Theater: In the Cross Hairs

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The germ of the show was planted in Sondheim's head back in the 1970s when he was judging scripts at a workshop for new musicals and came upon one called Assassins. It was a different, Manchurian Candidate--like story about a war veteran hired to assassinate a President, but Sondheim remembered it years later when he was discussing ideas with Weidman, his collaborator on Pacific Overtures. Their first thought was to create a musical about assassinations through history, starting with Julius Caesar. They eventually narrowed it to assassins of U.S. Presidents--each of whom gets a moment in the spotlight, voicing grievances both real and imagined, poignant and farcical. Sondheim sees the show as a comment on the dark side of the American Dream. "If you are led to believe that you can be President, so to speak, and you find out that you can't--that you have mistaken the kind of idealized dream for reality--you're likely to get angry," he says. "And maybe likely to want to kill a symbol."

Sondheim and Weidman have made only minor changes for the new production (directed by Joe Mantello) beyond including a new song, Something Just Broke, written for the 1992 London version. It's a nice addition to a score that is (oddly, given the subject) one of Sondheim's most tuneful and accessible, with its stylistic echoes of American folk ballads, gospel hymns, Sousa-style marches and turn-of-the-century waltzes. Sondheim has little patience for the long-voiced criticism that many of his scores abandon melody for astringent experimentation. "I do what is required for each show," he says. Besides, melody is "a very tricky word," he says. "When someone says a tune is not melodic, they mean they can't hum it easily. And my claim would be, if I play it for you 10 times, you will be able to hum it."

Sondheim, the guru for a generation of musical-theater composers, won't comment on the state of the Broadway musical (he doesn't want to hurt any feelings) and says he doesn't see many musicals anyway. He prefers going to straight plays, watches movies at home on video (recent favorites: The Barbarian Invasions and Elephant) and listens mostly to symphonic music--"nonvocal, because the words are so distracting." With Assassins coming together, he is buckling down to finish three final songs for The Frogs ("I'm a slow writer, and I only have a month to do them, so it's tight"). Then he may turn back to his troubled Bounce, which he and Weidman based on the lives of Wilson and Addison Mizner, brothers who got caught up in everything from the Alaska gold rush to the Florida land boom. The show has gone through two directors, three titles and several approaches--and still seemed to miss the mark in a Washington tryout last year. "I don't know what to do with that show because I like it the way it is," Sondheim says. "That's what's baffling."