Overview
When Assassins premiered Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on December 18, 1990, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman built a musical around a deliberately disturbing premise: bringing together the men and women who attempted—or succeeded—in assassinating presidents of the United States. Set in a surreal American carnival, the musical ignores chronological time and allows historical figures from different eras to meet one another. John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, Leon Czolgosz, Giuseppe Zangara, Lee Harvey Oswald, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, Sara Jane Moore, and John Hinckley Jr. become part of the same theatrical community. The show does not ask audiences to admire them. Instead, it asks something more uncomfortable: what happens when the promise that anyone can achieve the American Dream collides with people who believe America has denied them the recognition, success, love, or power they deserve? A carnival Proprietor invites them to “shoot a president” and win a prize. From there, Assassins transforms American popular musical styles into a dark examination of grievance, entitlement, fame, political violence, and national mythology. Songs including “Everybody’s Got the Right,” “The Ballad of Booth,” “The Gun Song,” “Unworthy of Your Love,” and “Another National Anthem” create one of Sondheim's most unsettling theatrical worlds.
Historical Era
Assassins premiered in 1990, near the end of a decade dominated on Broadway by spectacular megamusicals such as Cats, Les Misérables, and The Phantom of the Opera. Sondheim and Weidman moved in almost the opposite direction.
Rather than offering an enormous romantic narrative, Assassins was compact, fragmented, politically provocative, and intentionally uncomfortable. Its original Off-Broadway production ran for only 73 performances. Its timing also mattered. The musical opened only a decade after the murder of John Lennon and the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, and memories of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. remained powerful in American culture. The show was therefore dealing not with distant historical violence but with a subject still embedded in national memory.
Historical & Cultural Context
The assassins represented in the musical came from radically different historical circumstances. John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865 after the Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War. Charles Guiteau killed President James Garfield in 1881 after convincing himself that he deserved a government appointment. Leon Czolgosz, influenced by anarchist politics and anger over inequality, assassinated William McKinley in 1901. Giuseppe Zangara attempted to kill Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 but instead fatally wounded Chicago mayor Anton Cermak. Later figures include Lee Harvey Oswald, identified by official investigations as John F. Kennedy's assassin, as well as Fromme and Moore, who separately attempted to kill Gerald Ford in 1975, and Hinckley, who shot Ronald Reagan in 1981. Sondheim and Weidman do not pretend these people shared a single ideology. What connects them theatrically is their sense that something they believed America owed them had not been delivered.
Production Innovation
The central theatrical metaphor of Assassins is the carnival shooting gallery. In the opening number, “Everybody's Got the Right,” the Proprietor uses the optimistic language of American individualism to encourage the assassins toward violence. The promise that everyone deserves happiness becomes grotesquely distorted into the suggestion that, if the world has disappointed you, you have the right to strike back at it. Sondheim reinforces this idea through musical style. Rather than giving the assassins sinister “villain music,” he draws upon recognizable forms of American popular music: marches, folk songs, ballads, barbershop harmony, soft-rock love songs, and patriotic sounds. The effect is deliberately disturbing.
The musical language that normally accompanies American nostalgia is used to tell stories of alienation and political violence. The assassins are not positioned outside American culture; musically, they emerge from inside it. The show's nonlinear structure is equally important. Historical periods collapse into one another so that the assassins can influence, encourage, and justify each other across time. History becomes a conversation.
Historical Significance
Assassins initially had a difficult theatrical life. Its 1990 premiere received divided reactions, and a planned Broadway production in 2001 was postponed following the September 11 attacks. But its reputation grew. The musical finally reached Broadway in 2004 in a Roundabout Theatre Company production directed by Joe Mantello, with a cast including Michael Cerveris, Neil Patrick Harris, Denis O'Hare, and Mario Cantone. The production won five Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical. Its changing reception is revealing. What seemed almost offensively provocative in 1990 increasingly came to be regarded as one of Sondheim's most incisive works about American identity. The musical's subjects—political violence, celebrity, grievance, isolation, radicalization, and the desire to become historically visible—have remained deeply relevant. The sequence involving Lee Harvey Oswald is especially important. The other assassins gather around him and argue that killing Kennedy will give all of them historical meaning. Individual grievance becomes part of a larger mythology. That scene reveals the musical's darkest argument: violence can offer people who feel invisible the fantasy of instant significance.
Why It Resonates With Me
What fascinates me about Assassins is the way it uses American history without turning history into something comfortable or heroic. The musical asks what happens to people who believe deeply in a culture's promise of individual success but conclude that the promise has failed them. What makes the show disturbing is that it does not place its characters completely outside the American story; it uses familiar American music and language to show how grievance can grow from distorted versions of ideas like freedom, recognition, and individual entitlement. For me, Assassins demonstrates that studying history is not only about celebrating the ideals a country creates—it is also about examining the darker possibilities those ideals can produce when they collide with alienation, resentment, and the desire to be remembered.
