Stephen Sondheim’s score for Assassins has always impressed me for how the late composer-lyricist captured the flavors of Americana: Sousa-like marches, barber shop quartet, folk ballad, and soft pop music, in telling a story that is inherently American. Quibble if you must about the musical’s themes, but there is no other musical more relevant in the post-Trump era than Assassins. Some have called it anti-patriotic, and others have erroneously stamped it as glorifying the work of psychotic, would be (and sometimes successful) killers of Presidents of the United States. Assassins is, in fact, a lament of the American dream and how its false promises and failure to deliver have driven individuals and, metaphorically, society as a whole, to the edge. One of the song’s in the musical is titled “Something Just Broke,” a reaction to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In reality, Assassins digs deeper than mere mourning, challenging our blind patriotism and posits the theory that the United States of America has been breaking since its inception. What better way for Sondheim to convey the generations of unrealized American dreams than to say it with the music that made America?
