ALBUM REVIEW : ‘Assassins’ Fails to Make the Hit

This writer must own up to a couple of things: First, to not having seen Stephen Sondheim’s latest musical, “Assassins,” when it played a three-week run at New York’s Playwrights’ Horizons in January (it was sold out before it ever opened), and, second, to being a Sondheim admirer. Shucks, let’s ‘fess up: a Sondheim fan.

The RCA Victor CD of “Assassins” that will hit the stores Tuesday is beautifully done, with a 33-piece orchestra conducted by longtime Sondheim associate Paul Gemingnani. It contains all nine songs of this slender 90-minute piece, which focuses on our gallery of presidential assassins and received mixed reviews. The CD comes complete with a copy of the lyrics, a synopsis and historical footnotes. In short, all the help it can give.

Because there’s no video portion, what you don’t get is a sense of how the show looked in New York, what critic Frank Rich described as the “variously glassy-eyed and vacant, demented and smiling, angry and psychopathic” expressions of this chorus line of bizarre misfits. And the fact that “everyone strutting in this procession packs, and eventually points, a gun.”

But you do hear the gun, again and again, like a blaspheming champagne cork or like a period at the end of a life. The punctuation is chilling. You never get used to it. And perhaps not seeing the musical at this point is a plus, because the reviewers found many more problems with the production and with John Weidman’s book (he also wrote the book for “Pacific Overtures”) than they did with the music and lyrics.

What you get here is Sondheim: a sardonic, sometimes witty, undiluted score that suggests that John Wilkes Booth might have killed Lincoln “because of bad reviews,” and that includes a love duet in which John Hinckley and Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme ask Jodie Foster and Charles Manson, respectively, what they must do to become “worthy” of their love. (As Fromme, the exceedingly reedy Annie Golden sounds more like the lovesick Eponine in “Les Miz” than Manson’s murderous love slave. It’s sinister.)

Only someone who managed to touch us deeply with a full-fledged musical about a cutthroat barber could so clearly interpret the country’s nightmares as the flip side of the American Dream and find biting humor in it. “Assassins” is the quest for those 15 minutes of celebrity gone dreadfully awry.

But--yes, there is a but--Sondheim’s music for “Assassins” is derivative of . . . Sondheim. Much of it is pleasant deja entendu . But no major discoveries here and, worse, disappointing lyrics. For all of their cleverness and customary crossword-puzzle symmetry, they frequently get preachy. Except for “The Ballad of Booth,” the only song that’s up to Sondheim’s best style and irony, the skewering is skin deep where it should be penetrating and deadly.

It is particularly difficult to sit through “November 22, 1963,” which is more dialogue than song and dismayingly prosaic dialogue at that. Nowhere is the sense of proclamation or the declamatory style more obvious. Assassins in the collective abstract are a banal bunch to ensnare. There is no escaping the ordinariness of such lines as:

Everybody’s got the right to be happy.

Don’t stay mad, life’s not as bad as it seems.

Well, maybe not--and neither is this album. It keeps you interested by virtue of its offbeat subject matter and the variety of musical styles it enlists and/or satirizes while remaining unmistakably Sondheim. But it falls short.

Question: If Sondheim has any plans to continue work on this musical (it clamors for attention), was it a good idea to come out with the CD now? This RCA Victor recording, the 17th in the label’s Sondheim oeuvre , will no doubt be snapped up as the curio that it is. But it doesn’t deliver quite the high-style goods that, unfairly or not, we’ve come to expect from this exceptional and unpredictable artist.