[In the following negative review of Assassins, Brustein focuses on the lack of connection between the content of the show and the musical genre, Sondheim's lack of insight, and the show’s failed attempts at irony.]

Assassins is the latest work of another auspicious talent, Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the music and lyrics to a book by John Weidman. In its present incarnation at Playwrights Horizons, it is a singularly bizarre performance. Sondheim has never been known for timidity in choosing material for musicals. Sweeney Todd, after all, was about a barber who sold off the dismembered parts of his murdered victims for consumption at dining room tables. With Assassins, however, he has chosen to memorialize tunefully the careers of that coterie of killers who aimed a variety of lethal weapons at the hides of American presidents, with John Wilkes Booth presiding as the tutelary spirit. People have reacted to his project like the stunned audience in Mel Brooks's The Producers, paralyzed by “Springtime for Hitler” sung by a chorus of high-stepping Nazis.

The difference is that Zero Mostel was purposely trying to achieve a flop; Sondheim's flop was thrust upon him. But what could he expect when he begins his show with a carny singer in a shooting gallery warbling, “Hey, pal, come here and kill a president,” and ends it with the sentiment that “everybody's got the right to be different. … Everybody's got the right to their dreams.” One suspects that irony is intended. In fact, the disjunction between form (musical comedy) and content (murder) leaves the evening dripping with irony, not all of it conscious. Sondheim's songs, for the most part, could be detached from their context and handed to disc jockeys, arousing the disquieting impression that these aberrant historical figures have been resurrected partly for the sake of selling platinum records. The assassins of Assassins are lurking in Tin Pan Alley.

Weidman's perfunctory book tracks the careers of John Wilkes Booth (who shot Lincoln), Charles Guiteau (who killed Garfield), Leon Czolgosz (who assassinated McKinley), Guiseppe Zangara (who tried to kill FDR), Samuel Byck (who planned to crash a plane into Nixon's White House), Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (who both made attempts on Ford), and John Hinckley (who shot Reagan). The show concludes with Lee Harvey Oswald in the Texas Book Depository. Assassins contends that the common motive of all these people was a passion for notoriety, that Booth, for example, “killed a country because of bad reviews” (“Lincoln, who got mixed reviews, because of you now gets only raves”). Not political conviction, then, but celebrity is the spur, a view that even informs the scenes in which Booth persuades Oswald to eschew suicide and make a name for himself instead (“You can close the New York Stock Exchange”). It is history seen through the eyes of show business. What is difficult to determine is how much of this is intended as mockery. Ironies begin to cohere only in the scenes featuring the incompetent failures. An imaginary encounter between Squeaky Fromme (Annie Golden) and Sara Moore (Debra Monk) is genuinely funny, replete with Manson stories and a shared love of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and so is the passion of Samuel Byck (Lee Wilkof in a Santa Claus suit) for Bernstein musicals. Still, the whole enterprise seems a little desperate, as does the staging of the normally confident Jerry Zaks. Scorsese's Taxi Driver provided much more insight into the motives of political assassins, and Altman's Nashville accompanied such insights with better music.