And it didn't mean a nickel,
You just shed a little blood,
And a lot of people shed a lot of tears.

Yes, you made a little moment
And you stirred a little mud --
But it didn't fix the stomach
And you've drunk you're final Bud,
And it didn't help the workers
And it didn't heal the country
And it didn't make them listen And they never said, "We're sorry"

By this point, the Assassins have made much of their differing motives for their actions: Booth sought to avenge the war-ravaged South, Hinckley to make his movie idol notice him, Moore to validate her radical credentials, Guiteau to secure a political appointment, Czolgosz to call attention to the plight of the immigrant worker, Zangara to kill the sharp stomach pains he blamed on the upper classes, Byck to do something about what he saw as the fundamentally corrupt American political machine, and Fromme to give Manson a chance to testify at her trial and preach to the world. There has not been any unifying factor pulling these wildly different people together. For the most part they spend their time commiserating or taunting one another, but it is not until the Balladeer tells them that they accomplished nothing that they finally band together in the name of a common goal (a perversion of the awakening to community responsibility in the fairy tale characters in Into the Woods); but it is important to note that nearly everything in Assassins is a perversion of something, and that is very much the point: finally even the national anthem is corrupted by their insanity, and the Assassins have realized that there is power in solidarity:

We're the other national anthem, folks,
The ones that can't get in
To the ball park.

Spread the word...

There's another national anthem, folks,
For those who never win,
For the suckers, for the pikers,
For the ones who might have been...

Suddenly, this collection of misfits and losers has become a unified front, led partly by their desire to make themselves heard ("Nobody would listen!" Byck screams in naked rage), partly by their desire to make the American Dream work for them, knowing all the time (their own personal and varied experiences have proved it to them) that it won't; so they realize that there is another side to the Dream, and they embrace it not so much because they have turned away from the ideals of the Dream, but because they have been rejected by it. Once that is understood, they can then begin to understand their dark purpose.

It is important to stress that until this moment, they had no purpose; they make much of their motives, but that is a very different thing. The Balladeer, in making them face up to their own ineffectuality, awakens what had been a latent sense of community. The taunting he has directed at them throughout the show has finally backfired, and instead of submission he gets active rebellion, an organized uprising which literally forces him out of the story, which is a brilliant reversal of the turn of events in Into the Woods which saw the characters feed their storyteller to the Giant; there, the removal of the outside voice served to remove the sense of destiny controlling the stories of the characters and thereby allow them to make decisions for themselves. In Assassins, the exile of the Balladeer serves to remove the only moral perspective available to the audience, a perspective which, until now, had been consistently brought to bear on the actions and motivations of the Assassins. The result is that the audience must now make its way without guidance in a moral wasteland.

What happens next may help explain the almost universal hostility with which the play was received: a musical cross-fade takes us to the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository and the bewildering image of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a pistol to his head while a radio announces the arrival of Kennedy's plane at nearby Love Field. If we are suddenly chilled, it is probably because we have (caught up in the events of the previous hour or so) forgotten all about Oswald. We have, in fact, been encouraged to do so, and if we suddenly realize that the faint uneasiness which has been nagging us throughout the show has been due to the absence of this particularly notorious assassin, I suspect we are reacting exactly as the authors intended. As the scene progresses, we realize that this is in fact what all of the previously scattered events have been pointing toward: a nightmare confrontation between the suicidal Oswald and the other Assassins led by Booth.

One need not accept the Warren Commission's comforting conclusion that Oswald was solely responsible for Kennedy's assassination (as I do not) to be both intellectually and emotionally provoked by this scene; nor should one be put off by the obviously fantastical nature of this climactic confrontation (which has the vaguely unnerving quality of a Twilight Zone episode). The fact is that Oswald and Kennedy (like Booth and Lincoln) have become parts of our national mythology (Oswald may not actually have pulled the trigger, just as Kennedy may not really have been the martyr he is often made out to be, but that is, by this time, beside the point): if Booth was the pioneer (the musical seems to say), the one who started the whole abominable tradition, then Oswald was the one who gave Booth and all the others legitimacy. He is in fact the vivid personification of the dark side of the Dream, as Kennedy is the personification of its ideals. "All your life you've wanted to be a part of something, Lee," Booth says as he implores Oswald to fulfill his destiny. "You're finally going to get your wish." Sondheim and Weidman have identified here the precise cultural and historical moment of the death of the American Dream, and what makes it so diabolical is their claim that that death was a premeditated murder. When the Assassins banded together to embrace the dark side of the Dream, they came away with the awful communal purpose of destroying its idealism and optimism:

BOOTH: You can close the New York Stock Exchange.

GUITEAU: Shut down the schools in Indonesia.

MOORE: In Florence, Italy, a woman will leap from the Duomo clutching a picture of your victim and cursing your name.

CZOLGOSZ: Your wife will weep --

FROMME: His wife will weep --

ZANGARA: The world will weep --

GUITEAU: Grief. Grief beyond imagining --

HINCKLEY: Despair --

MOORE: The death of innocence and hope --

CZOLGOSZ: The bitter burdens which you bear --

BYCK: The bitter truths you carry in your heart --

GUITEAU: You can share them with the world.

BOOTH: You have the power of Pandora's Box, Lee. Open it.

In this moment all of the musical's fragments have coalesced into a chilling vision of trampled dreams and corrupted innocence, of evil reaching out to evil, of that underside of American existence we would all rather ignore standing up and shouting, "No! I am here, I exist, and I am not going to go away!"

What makes all this so difficult for many viewers to swallow is that Sondheim and Weidman offer no solutions: the Assassins, and the social and cultural conditions which created them, are simply there. There is no easy way to explain or deal with them; and anyway Sondheim and Weidman's presentation of them is entirely metaphorical, not really meant to be taken literally or realistically (the historical subject matter is misleading), which may account for some of the confusion on the part of the critics. Many similarly problematic works which handle provocative or controversial subjects are often misread on that basis: Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending (1957) and Suddenly Last Summer (1958) are prominent examples, as are Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1965), Sam Shepard's family plays (Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, True West, Fool for Love, and A Lie of the Mind), David Rabe's Hurlyburly (1985), Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver (1976), David Mamet's House of Games (1986), Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), Sondheim's own Follies and Merrily We Roll Along, even Hitchock's Psycho (1960). All are penetrating -- indeed, terrifying -- explorations of American pathology (though they are all also considerably more than that), all make use of the conventions of their genre (Greek tragedy, family drama, film noir, political thriller, Broadway musical, horror story, mystery), and all have been as misunderstood as Assassins, in large part, I believe, because of their predominantly metaphorical structure and execution. Assassins is not, despite the subject, a musical about presidential assassins, any more than Suddenly Last Summer is a play about cannibalism and homosexuality, or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? about a deteriorating marriage, or JFK about the "true" events of the Kennedy assassination. The things that all of these works are ostensibly about are actually metaphors for the deterioration of American innocence. Indeed, each of them can stand as a cultural milestone in the decline and fall of the American Dream, which had its beginnings in the aftermath of World War II (the Holocaust and the dawn of the Nuclear Age) and reached its culmination in the Sixties and Seventies (the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King, Vietnam, Watergate, widespread urban decay, and economic Armageddon). Assassins tracks this deterioration not only by contrasting the idealism of such early assassins as Booth and Czolgosz (a follower of Emma Goldman) with the deviance and madness of later ones like Fromme, Byck, Moore, and Hinckley, but also by identifying that deviance and madness as both cause and effect of the deterioration. Disaffected and impoverished historical figures like Czolgosz, Zangara, Oswald, Fromme, Moore, and Hinckley are made to stand as symbols of a society which is losing control of itself, while the cycle of violence breeding more violence which the musical presents comes as a vivid warning of the eventual cost of that lost control.

These are not themes with which standard audiences generally wish to be confronted, and the fact that they were asked to deal with such confrontation from a musical was perhaps too much for most of them. It is truly remarkable how widespread is the notion (even now after Sondheim, Prince, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, Jerome Robbins, and Leonard Bernstein) that musicals are not supposed to be complicated musically or intellectually, are not supposed to be challenging, are in fact supposed to be light, simple, escapist entertainment; and perhaps that is only to be expected, since the musical is still the most popular theatrical form in the United States, and the classics of the genre (Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Carousel, Brigadoon, My Fair Lady, Camelot, and numerous others) were all, for the most part, written during a time of great national optimism, and as a result were honest and accurate reflections of their cultural and historical milieu. The problem with so many of the new musicals is that they try to regenerate that optimism into a culture for which it is no longer meaningful. A show like The Phantom of the Opera may be lush and romantic, with beautiful sweeping melodies and gorgeous scenery and costumes, all in the grand style of such aforementioned classics as Show Boat and My Fair Lady, except for the fact that it tries to transplant the style of another era to our contemporary one, where it looks and sounds like an antique; the distinction being that Show Boat and My Fair Lady, along with works like Porgy and Bess, Of Thee I Sing, Pal Joey, The Threepenny Opera, Street Scene, Lost in the Stars, Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music, Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella, Candide, West Side Story, Gypsy, Cabaret, Fiddler on the Roof, Sweet Charity, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Pippin, Chicago, A Chorus Line, Evita, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Les Miserables, The Secret Garden, and, just lately, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Blood Brothers, and Tommy belong to their own times (even though some of them are period pieces adapted from older -- and often significantly different -- works), exposing universal truths through examination of their contemporary concerns (that's what makes them classics), while The Phantom of the Opera -- like La Cage aux Folles, for all its pseudo-significant social consciousness; or Miss Saigon, for all its attempted political sophistication; or Annie, with its anachronistic sweetness and optimism; or the recent Will Rogers Follies, a complete regression to both the style and subject matter of an earlier period -- in trying to replicate the values of a different era in a style which may be theatrically viable but is no longer culturally pertinent, remain only nostalgic.

What this amounts to, in the case of Assassins, is a musical which, like Company and Follies and Merrily We Roll Along, uses the styles of the past to examine the state of contemporary America. Music in these shows functions (for Americans) as a sort of collective unconscious, providing audiences with a common frame of reference, which helps explain why most British productions of Sondheim musicals are so unsatisfying: the particular musical forms which he so often makes use of are so fundamentally American that British productions tend to lose much of their resonance. Like Show Boat, Pal Joey, Gypsy, Cabaret, Follies, Chicago and A Chorus Line, Assassins makes use of a theatrical performance mode which is so much a part of the average spectator's frame of experience that thematic concerns are established in the very concept (form does not simply reflect content, it actually becomes content); by reinventing classical American musical forms -- as well as the indigenous theatrical form of the musical revue -- within a thematically and politically provocative context, Assassins (along with its sister, Follies) transcends the merely topical and assumes an almost mythic resonance.

For a long time, the musical has had a reputation as America's single most significant contribution to world theater, a curious distinction for a genre which most critics and scholars still refuse to take seriously; but if Sondheim's work doesn't conform with what have become the conventions of the genre, we need only recognize that he is writing from a different historical perspective and for a different audience than his predecessors. His work is not for all tastes, and Assassins in particular is difficult and problematic; but its message -- and its methods -- are legitimate. Unfortunately, until the musical comes to be regarded as a serious theatrical, musical, and literary form, work like Assassins (and Sondheim's work in general, or the work of anyone seeking to explore the possibilities of the form) will probably continue to meet with scorn, outrage, and misunderstanding. The most serious practitioners of the form (Harold Prince, Tommy Tune, Susan Schulman, Marsha Norman, Lucy Simon, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, James Lapine, William Finn, Alan Menken, George Wolfe, Playwrights Horizons; the late Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett, and Howard Ashman; and of course Sondheim) have given us glimpses of its potential; the next step is with the critics, and, more importantly, the audience.

Discuss this in Finishing the Chat, Sondheim.com's discussion forum.