THEATER

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

ASSASSINS Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Book by John Weidman

When the ever venturesome Stephen Sondheim said his new musical would portray people who killed, or tried to kill, U.S. Presidents, even fans of his acerbic wit and nonpareil invention wondered how such a show could be put together. The work that opens off-Broadway this week amply, at times brilliantly, demonstrates how. The question that lingers is why.

Assassins is a sketchbook, sparse and almost forgettable in its musical elements, dominated by skits that would have been too extreme for Saturday Night Live in its heyday. The linking idea is that assassins constitute a sort of club, with past and future killers inspiring one another in a grand conspiracy. This mildly provocative notion is made silly by being rendered literal: the opening features a carnival shooting gallery and then a kind of time-warp barroom where John Wilkes Booth meets John W. Hinckley Jr., where Leon Czolgosz, killer of William McKinley, encounters Giuseppe Zangara, attempted murderer of Franklin Roosevelt. In the climax, Booth and the others show up in Dallas to persuade Lee Harvey Oswald to shoot John F. Kennedy instead of killing himself.

The tone of these scenes is windily self-important, the intellectual content embarrassingly slight. Even worse is the inherent contradiction between deploring the folk mythification of assassins and sustaining that very process by having a singer-narrator twang knowing ditties about the killers.

But Assassins also offers funny, astutely varied glimpses of looniness, the finest being a park-bench chat between attempted assassins of Gerald Ford: Lynette ("Squeaky") Fromme, a Charles Manson disciple who is all passion and intensity; and Sara Jane Moore, a former mental patient, who in Debra Monk's stunning evocation is all matronly giggles and chilling folksiness. In other ably written scenes, Victor Garber brings condescending grandeur to Booth, Terrence Mann finds earnest simplicity in Czolgosz, Greg Germann gives a dorky sweetness to Hinckley, and Jonathan Hadary evokes hysterical egomania in Charles Guiteau, killer of James Garfield.

Still, for all its wit, the text (by John Weidman, Sondheim's collaborator on Pacific Overtures) has no obvious topical resonances -- and probably could not, given that the authors view assassination as arising from thwarted ambition rather than any ideology or cause. As satire, Assassins is pointless: it attacks people who have no defenders. As pop sociology, it makes points about fame, envy and media culture that were made far more richly in John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves. One is left wondering -- not least because of an imagined conversation between a would-be assassin and composer Leonard Bernstein -- whether Sondheim's personal interest lies in the borderline between obsessive fandom and murderous envy. That topic might yield a far better show.