Sondheim's Assassins

Went to see Sondheim's Assassins last night with a colleague from work and a group of her former roommates at the Boston Center for the Arts. I'd heard bits and pieces of the show over the years, but as is often the case with musicals didn't have a full grasp of the story until sitting down to watch it end to end. And even now I'm not sure I fully understand it. Like most Sondheim musicals, it's a musical-cum-dark-comedy, composed largely of vignettes in which presidential assassins and would-be presidential assassins hold forth on their disillusionment and idealism. Bookended in the play by John Wilkes Booth (Lincoln) and Lee Harvey Oswald (Kennedy), and ranging freely through time, it showed me how woefully behind I am in my knowledge of presidential assassination attempts . . . but I enjoyed it in a dark sort of way.

(image nicked from the Boston Globe).