The superstitious might, with some evidence, argue that when a major New York production of Assassins is announced, it’s time to get very nervous. The original production opened off-Broadway in December of 1990, and its failure to move to Broadway has been blamed in part on a surge of patriotic sentiment as the first Gulf War began in January of 1991. Twenty years later, a Broadway production was planned to open in November of 2001, but the events of September 11 made a musical about assassination (especially the scene featuring Samuel Byck outlining a plan to “drop a 747 on the White House”) feel, once again, catastrophically out of step with the national zeitgeist. The production was postponed for three years and opened in the second year of the Iraq War in 2004. The current off-Broadway revival playing at the Classic Stage Company was to have opened in April of 2020, but was delayed for over a year by the COVID-19 pandemic. Whatever curse Macbeth conveys, Assassins may be equally dangerous.

Curse or no, we bravely document the musical at the Library for the Performing Arts in several of our collections. Video recordings of the original 1991 Playwrights Horizons production and the 2004 Broadway premiere can be viewed onsite in the Theatre on Film and Tape Archive. Additionally, we preserve programs from several major productions staged both in the United States and in the UK.

More uniquely, we also preserve the process of designing the original promotional materials, including the hand-drawn white stars on a blue background used on the original Playbill and cast recording. The discarded ideas are interesting both for what they reveal about the design process for a musical theatre logo and as representations of what the team viewed as important themes in the show.

For example, an early design literalized the idea of getting into the assassins’s heads.

Another suggests that the musical was about those who chose to use guns rather than their freedom of speech to effect change (or perhaps it is meant to represent the self-justifications of the assassins, which are central to the show).

This draft plays on the idea in the musical that the assassins feel the foundational ideas of America convey the “right to be different,” and perhaps a duty to change things by revolution if necessary. Here, Uncle Sam offers a gun with the implication that violence is a patriotic duty.

The team also experimented with word art, including this piece featuring the title on the reverse of an American flag (suggesting, somewhat obtusely, the show’s focus on the dark side of the American dream).

This design mixes typefaces to suggest an anonymous note cut from magazines or newsprint, but the letters also suggest the self-perceived extraordinary individuality of each of the assassins. The line break also highlights the word “sins” in the title.

In this word art draft, the elimination of an individual is suggested by the fallen and bloodied letter “I” (as in the personal pronoun).

  This design tried the same idea but with the “I”  conspicuously absent.

Also in this collection is a single sheet with smaller versions of many of the ideas depicted, with certain ideas presumably selected for further development by a red check mark and others discarded with a red “X.”

About midway through the stapled sheaf of ideas is the image the team finally selected.The artwork depicts the stars of the American flag roughly chalked on their field, with a gap where one seems to be missing. The image suggests an absence that is noticeable, even stark, but which does not ultimately render the flag unrecognizable. Assassination is a crime against democracy; but, as the Balladeer sings, it “doesn’t stop the story / story’s pretty strong.”