Director Joe Calarco has allowed a faulty concept to overtake his much-anticipated staging of the darkly comic Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical Assassins, now playing at Signature Theatre. As a result, this show about people with guns is a misfire.

Assassins is by no a means a conventional musical. It delves into the minds of nine people -- including John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald -- who either failed or succeeded in the obscene practice of assassinating American presidents. Through his score, Sondheim compels the audience to come to grips with this group of misfits and crazy zealots, whose only common ground may be their dissatisfaction with how the American dream has eluded[...]