Theater: In the Cross Hairs

Before his musical Assassins makes its long-awaited Broadway debut next week, Stephen Sondheim has one piece of friendly advice for New York City theatergoers. Leave town.

This is not a knock on a show that has been the unwanted child in a brood of Sondheim hits that stretch from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to Into the Woods. No, he's raising the alert level for good, practical reasons. Back in 1991, just before Assassins opened off-Broadway, the first Gulf War broke out. The patriotic climate was not ripe for a musical that showcased nine killers and would-be killers of U.S. Presidents; the show got mixed reviews and never moved to Broadway. A decade later a new, Broadway version was gearing up to open in the fall of 2001. Two days after Sept. 11, the producers shut it down. "There was no chance of an audience coming in with an open mind," says Sondheim. "I wouldn't if I were the audience." Now, 2 1/2 years later, Assassins is finally, warily trying again. "I tell you, get your family out of town till we open," jokes the composer. "We seem to be the harbingers of disaster."

For some critics, what Sondheim and book writer John Weidman put onstage in 1991 was disaster enough. A carnival barker, under neon signs blaring HIT THE PREZ! WIN A PRIZE!, opens the show by luring in a parade of customers like John Wilkes Booth, John Hinckley and Charles Guiteau, the "disappointed office seeker" who shot President James A. Garfield. Hinckley and Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme--wannabe assassins of Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, respectively--sing a duet about unrequited love, in their cases for Jodie Foster and Charles Manson. One musical number ends in an electrocution, another in a hanging. Samuel Byck, who plotted to kill Richard Nixon, talks about wanting to crash a 747 into the White House (a line from 1991 that hasn't been changed). How in-your-face is this show? Sondheim originally wanted to open it at the former Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. Says he, with a smile worthy of Sweeney Todd: "It would have been sensational."

Sondheim, 74, was padding around his ritzy Manhattan town house (Katharine Hepburn used to live next door) on a recent weekday afternoon, looking a bit scruffy in an oversize T shirt but talking animatedly about the show that he was always surprised got such a "virulent" negative reaction. The most celebrated Broadway composer of the past 30 years hasn't had a new show on Broadway in 10--since Passion, which ran for eight months in 1994. The days when Sondheim shows like Company and Follies seemed to be opening doors for musical theater are long gone. After years of work, Sondheim's latest show, Bounce, is on hold after two poorly received pre-Broadway tryouts. Meanwhile, he has been looking backward, adding six new songs to The Frogs, a 1974 show based on Aristophanes' play that will make its Broadway debut this summer in a revamped version written by (and starring) Nathan Lane. But Assassins is the Sondheim show in the cross hairs at the moment. Has its time finally come?