ASSASSINS March 6, 2008

Just in time for the Presidential primaries, New Line Theatre's 17th season continues March 6-29, 2008, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, with one of the true stage masterpieces of the twentieth century, Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's powerful, funny, and disturbing ASSASSINS, a musical that gives voice to the men and women who've tried to kill American presidents, exploring their neuroses, their passions, their delusions, and their reasons, all in a wild vaudeville of American politics. This is a show that dares to let these uniquely American misfits tell their own stories and make their own cases, as they slowly realize that together, across the decades, they have become a powerful force for change. Theirs is the other national anthem, the dark underbelly of the American Dream. Frank Rich wrote about the show in The New York Times, "The effect is... as if someone had removed a huge boulder from the picturesque landscape of American history to expose to light all the mutant creatures that had been hiding in the dankness underneath. In Assassins, a daring work even by his lights, Mr. Sondheim and his collaborator, the writer John Weidman, say the unthinkable, though they sometimes do so in a deceptively peppy musical-comedy tone. Without exactly asking that the audience sympathize with some of the nation's most notorious criminals, this show insists on reclaiming them as products, however defective, of the same values and traditions as the men they tried to murder."

Official Website: http://www.newlinetheatre.com/assassinspage.html