The first anniversary of the July 13, 2024, attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump landed with all the grace of a brick hurled through a living room window.
Few of Trump’s critics dared to comment on it then, except to say that political violence in the United States was clearly out of control. Now, with the distance of time and Trump back in office, many of those same critics can gawk openly at the religious context in which the assassination attempt has since been placed.
On the side of Trump’s supporters, by contrast, the hunt was on for the scalps that might be collected in search of who among the security personnel was responsible for such a momentous gaffe. And, with the distance of time and Trump back in office, those same supporters can gasp in awe at the religious context in which the assassination attempt has since been placed.
Far more compelling than anniversary pieces on random political violence are artistic works that attempt to express the forces and emotions behind them. In that realm, Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins, which premiered Off-Broadway in 1990, is unlikely to be surpassed.
Compared to Sondheim’s other masterpieces—e.g., Company (1970), Sweeney Todd (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984)—Assassins, on its face, has little to sell itself. It crams the stage with nine personalities of various presidential assassins through U.S. history. Its songs and ensemble pieces fail to charm the ears and imagination. With Assassins, it is almost as if Sondheim has deliberately denied his cast anything compelling besides their twisted motive to murder a U.S. president, warped by either narcissistic madness or delusional ideology. In concept, it is almost as if Sondheim dared to embrace the most off-putting subject matter this side of Springtime for Hitler—outlined to comic perfection in Mel Brooks’s 1967 film The Producers—and march it across the tightrope of questionable taste. DVD copies of Sondheim musicals abound for viewing pleasure. Not so with Assassins. The best we can do to see this musical in full is to piece it together via YouTube clips, or wait for your local theater company to tackle a production.
Even a plot summary fails to convey this musical’s strange charm. Set in a carnival fairgrounds shooting gallery, Sondheim assembles his nine chosen assassins for a round of introductions: Charles Guiteau (assassin of President James A. Garfield in 1881), Leon Czolgosz (assassin of President William McKinley in 1901), Giuseppe Zangara (attempted assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933), Samuel Byck (hijacked a plane in an attempts to crash it into President Nixon’s White House in 1974), Manson family cult member Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme (attempted assassin of President Gerald Ford in 1975), Sara Jane Moore (attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, only 17 days after Fromme’s attempt), and John Hinckley, the would-be 1981 assassin of President Ronald Reagan who fancied himself Jodi Foster’s boyfriend. Booth and Oswald get prime roles, being the most “successful” in ending the lives of two of the United States’ most beloved presidents. Still, all nine together take individual turns in attempts to explain themselves, quarrel among themselves, and harmonize their madness in Sondheim’s peculiar, but signature, key of murderous pleading. (Had Sondheim written Assassins after Thomas Crooks’s attempt on President Trump’s life he might have included him in the cast as well. Then again, the case of Thomas Crooks is so odd and out of place that not even MAGA conspiracists have done anything remarkable with his memory.)
None of the nine makes for a sympathetic portrait. Instead, they make a searing indictment of the failed promises of the American Dream. The lyrics of “Everybody’s Got the Right” demonstrate how personal aspirations become confused and sour when cast against the promises of freedom and liberty. “Another National Anthem” shows us the horror of multiplying personal reasons in a nation of pluralism: “I did it because no one cares about the poor man’s pain,” cries Czolgosz; “I did it so they would suffer in the North the way we’d suffered in the South,” sings Booth; “I did it so she’d [Jodi Foster] pay attention,” wails Hinckley. Assassins is a gallery of madness, a portrait of a nation surrendered to nihilism. The stage becomes awash in the anger and disillusionment of each assassin alone, then compounded in unison.
There are moments of light bonding, as when Fromme and Moore take out a shared hatred for their fathers by shooting up a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken emblazoned with Colonel Sanders’ portrait. Mostly, however, this peculiar musical is an extended cri de coeur. What makes the musical art is that it creates the illusion that every assassin is explaining themselves in a way uniquely anchored in history, song, and the creative lens of Sondheim himself. As the hand of Sondheim recedes more and more to become seemingly invisible, the horror of American violence becomes more visible. “The Gun Song” falls about midway through most productions and could be a de facto U.S. national anthem. At the musical’s end, all nine assassins turn their guns straight on the theater audience, only to, in some productions, turn them away again. Political violence, as always, is a real-life theater of misses, lethal hits, and close calls.
Assassins may not be fun—or even a funny—piece of musical theater. The more you dig into Sondheim’s least popular work, however, the more it becomes the musical we cannot turn away from. In our partisan age, becoming ever more partisan, it reflects too much of what we have become as a nation.
