Original Off-Broadway Cast, 1991 (RCA) (3 / 5) There’s no doubt that Stephen Sondheim’s scores are brilliant. His lyrics are innovative; he’s the master of intellectual argument in rhyme. His best melodies, though often overshadowed by acclaim for his superb wordsmithing, are slyly inventive. Yet when the messages in his musicals are examined, they sometimes turn out to be less than the sum of the sung parts. So it is with this revue, written in collaboration with librettist John Weidman, which trots out a bevy of men and women who shot at, and in some instances killed, U.S. presidents. Sondheim and Weidman suggest that, for many unfortunate citizens, the American Dream is a nightmare. Accordingly, they set forth a series of songs — some portentous, some ironically lighthearted — to show how a sense of disenfranchisement can lead to assassination. Sondheim’s pastiche score is jaunty. Weidman’s sketches aren’t included in their entirely on this recording, with the exception of the attenuated Lee Harvey Oswald sequence, wherein John Kennedy’s murderer is visited in his Texas Book Depository hideout by the spirits of assassins past and future. (The idea is that Oswald acted as a representative of a continuing, perhaps inevitable tradition.) The cast assembled to play this group of history’s outcasts includes some of the best musical theater performers of the time, although only Victor Garber as John Wilkes Booth really gets to shine. Among the others warbling and emoting are Annie Golden, Jonathan Hadary, Patrick Cassidy, Eddie Korbich, William Parry, Terrence Mann, Lee Wilkof, and Debra Monk. — David Finkle

Broadway Cast, 2004 (PS Classics) (4 / 5) It’s likely that there will never be a better production of this revue about bumping off presidents as a pastime for disgruntled citizens with irrational gripes. From start to finish, the Roundabout Theatre Company staging was a honey. Tony Awards were handed to the production, director Joe Mantello, and supporting actor Michael Cerveris, who infused the plum role of John Wilkes Booth with great fervor. The same kind of care has been given to the recording, on which Becky Ann Baker, James Barbour, Mario Cantone,  Mary Catherine Garrison, Alexander Gemignani, Neil Patrick Harris, Marc Kudisch, Jeffrey Kuhn, Denis O’Hare, and Cerveris raise their voices in disturbing song. Sondheim’s Americana pastiches, with big-and-brassy and plangent arrangements by Michael Starobin, fully demonstrate the composer-lyricist’s mastery — most definitely including a powerful new song, “Something Just Broke.” Much of the dialogue by John Weidman is retained on the CD, including the penultimate scene in which Lee Harvey Oswald’s predecessors come out of the shadows on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository and cajole their hesitant boy into firing. This is bold if not always convincing material, polished to near perfection.  — D.F.

Off-Broadway Cast, 2022 (Broadway Records) (5 / 5) In common with other works of art, some musicals become “dated” in a negative way over the years and decades, but quite the opposite has happened with Assassins.  When the show premiered Off Broadway and the score was first recorded in 1991, many critics and audience members were put off by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s often ironically vaudevillian, sometimes earnest exploration of certain Americans expressing their unhappiness, frustration, and rage over their sorry lots in life by killing, or at least attempting to kill, Presidents of the United States. But subsequent events, such as the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President and the attempt by a violent mob  to overtake the Capitol when Trump was not reelected four years later, have underlined the remarkable prescience of this show in identifying and examining a cancerous underbelly of national disaffection that shows no signs of healing. All of which may at least in part explain why Assassins was largely hailed as a masterpiece in the Classic Stage Company’s 2022 Off-Broadway revival. The minor flaws of that production, directed by John Doyle, were limited to a few moments of unfocused staging and an odd inconsistency in costuming; but neither of those issues arise when one is listening to this superbly well produced cast album, sparked by the excellent performances of Eddie Cooper as the Proprietor, Ethan Slater as the Balladeer/Lee Harvey Oswald, Steven Pasquale as a compellingly tormented John Wilkes Booth, Judy Kuhn as Sara Jane Moore, Brandon Uranowitz as Leon Czolgosz, and Will Swenson as an absolutely insane Charles Guiteau. The entire album is aces, with especially strong performances of “The Ballad of Booth,” the “Gun Song,” “The Ballad of Guiteau,” “Something Just Broke,” and “Unworthy of Your Love,” the eerily sweet ballad that has been a highlight of every Assassins recording, here sung and acted to creepy perfection by Adam Chanler-Berat as John Hinckley and Tavi Gevinson as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme.  Talk about eerie: Hinckley, who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981, was released from psychiatric care in 2016, and all court restrictions on his lifestyle and freedom were lifted in 2022 — the very year of this Assassins revival. — Michael Portantiere