What is shocking is the timing of this opening. (Assassins previously ran one month only at Off Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons to tepid reviews and little interest in 1991 during Gulf War I.) When first scheduled to open on Broadway after 9/11 the show was considered inappropriate. Why, with terrorism and violence now on our shores, in our city and potentially around every corner, is this a better time to open? (Three of the play’s hero/assassinators share terrorists’ suicidal and religious fanaticism: Samuel Byck, who tried to highjack a commercial airliner in l994 to fly into the White House and kill Pres. Nixon – sound familiar Condoleeza? - Charles Guiteau, the delusional evangelist who shot Pres. Garfield in the back in 1881, and “Squeaky” Fromme, a crazed disciple of cult leader/murderer Charles Manson who tried to shoot Gerald Ford - the others’ motives were less lofty). Is this the best time to romanticize assassinations, with the country as actively involved in a rancorous presidential election? When tempers are heated and political partisanship is virulent and the theater is only 20 blocks away from this summer’s Republican Party Convention in NYC? The country is as divided now as it was during the Civil War when Booth was driven to kill Lincoln.

The innovation here is writer John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim’s attempt to musicalize the minds of the potential killers – “Listen to the stories, hear it in the songs…”, in an indictment of the American culture in which everyman is encouraged to believe he can climb to the top so those who are left at the bottom live lives of quiet desperation. These assassins believe their only way out is to do something horrific to get recognition/immortality. (Today’s reality TV would have realized their quest more amicably).

Musically it is possible, even probable that Sondheim’s score is “ brilliant”. His harmonies are “hard to describe but instantly identifiable” one aficionado exclaims. “It’s the construction, how he builds his themes” the purists say. “His lyrics come at you like bullets”. (Oh, is that good?). The score illustrates his signature complex construction in which, though there are only nine “songs” listed, their musical themes intertwine around the characters in wall to wall music for a full two hours. It is also possible that the composer, whose disdain for melody has been publicly stated, has offered his most hum-able selections borrowing freely from Americana. His tunes are uplifting and sweet, in the style of folk music and pop melodies, Sousa-like marches, country hoedowns and gospel. But these melodic moments are obliterated as soon as you catch their ironically sinister lyrics and the songs eventually descend into typical Sondheim edginess and dissonance.

One character, Samuel Byck (Mario Cantone) screams into a tape to Leonard Bernstein (with whom Sondheim collaborated as lyricist in those early days when his lyrics held optimistic sunny sentiments) “ We need more LOVE songs!” Yes, Sondheim does write the proscribed love songs but, in the ultimate irony, he puts them in the mouths of murderers as they romanticize such objects as trigger fingers and guns. Put them in a cabaret act and they sound great – put them in this show and they make your flesh crawl.

In appropriately lunatic conspiracy writer John Weidman, director Joe Mantello and set designer Robert Brill have placed these historical characters in a shooting gallery of a carnival where the targets are the presidents and the prize is…. happiness???? Surrounded by the bare bones of a stairway leading up to a rollercoaster/gallows, the show’s identifiable theme song “Everybody’s Got The Right” could conceivably be an anthem for society’s outcasts, the musical equivalent of Jerry Herman’s “I Am What I Am”. But, where Herman wrote for gays, Sondheim writes it for murderers. Conductor Paul Gemignani seems relaxed as he sits in his side loge box with half his orchestra (the other half on the other side) but, Sondheim veteran that he is, he is right on top of the syncopated rhythms, occasion accents and other quirks in a Sondheim score.

The production opens with the Proprietor (Marc Kudish) huckstering "Hey, pal, feelin' blue? Don't know what to do? ... C'mere and kill a president." ; The opening anthem is an upbeat number: “Everybody has a Right to Be Happy, everybody has a right to their dreams…everybody’s free from bail, no one can be put in jail for their dreams”. That would sound happy were it not sung under a sign that says “Hit the President! Win a Prize! (one is a Jodie Foster doll) . In the peppy “Ballad of Booth”, sung and whistled by the babyfaced, pure toned Balladeer (Neil Patrick Harris) “ ;they say you killed a country John because of bad reviews …” but Booth (Michael Cerveris) sings in reply “What I did was kill the man who killed my country” in a touchingly sad refrain. “Let them cry ‘ dirty traitor’ they will understand it later… The country is not what it was” The Balladeer concludes, “Lincoln who got mixed reviews, because of you, John, now gets raves”

Even the normal folk do not fall beneath Sondheim’s aim. In “How I Saved Roosevelt” an excited handful of onlookers warm to the spotlight as they recount how they blocked would be a Roosevelt assassinator, pint sized Guiseppe Zingara ((Jeffrey Kuhn), by getting in his view so he missed and killed Chicago’s Mayor Cermak instead, turning a tragedy into bragging rights.

By far the most disturbing is the “The Gun Song” a lilting ensemble waltz/love song, led by Pres. McKinley’s assassinator, Carl Czolgosz (James Barbour), Booth, Guiteau and Sara Jane Moore (Becky Ann Baker) who took a shot at Gerald Ford in l975, ”…all you have to do is crook your little finger to change the world”. A tender ballad ”Unworthy of Your Love” is sung by lovesick John Hinckley (Alexander Gemignani) and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme ((Mary Catherine Garrison) to Jodie Foster and Charles Manson respectively. “I’ll find a way to earn your love wait and see, then you will turn your love to me” they prophetically and passionately croon. “Guiteau’s Ballad” is a startlingly upbeat Gospel/High steppin’ collaboration between the Balladeer and Guiteau as he ascends the rickety spiral steps heavenward to his hanging “I am going to my Lordy” (taken from a poem actually written and read by the doomed man from the gallows), stunningly performed by Dennis Hare.

This premiere includes a new song (written for a London production 1992), " ;Something Just Broke," sung by the “good people”, the victims of the turmoil created. In a stunning theatrical device, dressed up in Susan Hilferty’s clean cut period costumes, their resemblance to the assassins is confusing and uncanny

The score culminates just before that in a cacophonous, nihilistic operatic tirade sardonically called “Another American Anthem… for the those who never win, for those who thrive on chaos and despair...”. In the new production The Balladeer morphs into Lee Harvey Oswald and the pathologic lineup from Booth on, who have led up to this moment, exhort him to join them. In a stunning moment of bad taste Mantello chose to project the famous Zapruder film of Kennedy’s assassination onto Oswald's T-shirt. “ Where’s my prize?” the ensemble sings as each shouts “ I did it because… I loved him, because my belly was on fire, to promote the sales of my book, because I got bad reviews, because no one cared about the poor man’s pain, so she’d pay attention, to be ambassador to France, so they’d know where I was coming from”.

The “anthem” continues “you gotta keep on trying everyday till you get your prize, but its never gonna happen…". But never fear, Sondheim will do it for them, give them their sought after prize – fame.

The real tragedy is that this show is likely to win a Tony for Best Revival over such national treasures and heart warming musicals as “Wonderful Town” and “Fiddler on the Roof”. What does that say of our current culture?