The Roundabout Theatre Company has brought Assassins, the 1991 musical drama by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, to Studio 54, the honky-tonkified theater recently vacated by Cabaret. The space is an accommodating hostess for an idea with a hook that's never found a story.

After the musical Wicked, director Joe Mantello returns to the more familiar realm of thought-provoking, issue-oriented sound bytes with Assassins, a collective reverie about the nine people who took their best shots at U.S. presidents throughout the years. Mantello (a Tony Award winner for Take Me Out last year, previously nominated for Love! Valour! Compassion!) and a cadre of designers with an appreciation for Marvel Comics fantasy dress the concept to the nines, but nothing can be done to link these nine individuals to anything besides delusion.

Studio 54 is a good fit for Robert Brill's shooting gallery of a set, placed beneath a huge wooden roller coaster that signifies the amusement park in the eye of Weidman's not-quite-focused mind. Actually, its more of a real-life shooting range than a gallery. Gun shop-style silhouette targets are custom made, representing all but one of the presidential victims. The guns supplied to the would-be assassins by the shop's proprietor (Marc Kudish as a fiendish, bare-headed genie with a forked tongue -- the better to produce a supple baritone) are replicas of the real armaments.

Among the culprits, only Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth comes across with a sense of mission above and beyond whatever inconvenience passes for disenfranchisement. Michael Cerveris gives a swashbuckling performance in the best role available, leaping the gaps in dramatic continuity where the production's abundance of style cannot.

That said, each of the other characters is a curio worth a celebrity-watch vignette, such as a production spot on The Tonight Show or, these days, a reality-TV turn. One suspects most of them would choose American Idol. Sondheim's music and lyrics are unusually folkloric, as if he were transcribing Woody and Arlo Guthrie, Janis Ian and Neil Diamond songbooks for a George White's Scandals. The effect really is haunting, played by a 13-piece band split on platforms to the left and right of the stage.

Assassins themes are played out in two numbers. The first is a circuslike, anthemic whomp called "Everybody's Got the Right", sung by the proprietor and killers, which posits that if you can't get what you think you deserve out of life, killing a president is a pretty good backup option. The other is a coda tacked on to the end of the show, "Something Just Broke", in which a beige chorus wonders what's gone wrong with society.

There are no answers but Assassins keeps looking, expecting to find something commonly meaningful at the bottom of these towering egos and their delusions, from "The Ballad of Booth" to "Unworthy of Your Love", a duet by Charles Manson disciple Lynnette "Squeaky" Fromme and Jodie Foster fan John Hinckley.

Denis O'Hare, a Tony winner for last year's Take Me Out, is a frighteningly upbeat, crazed Charles Guiteau, who shot president James Garfield in 1881. James Barbour is Leon Czolgosz, a tall, solemn Polish immigrant stuck in a dead-end existence when he killed William McKinley in 1901. Jeffrey Kuhn is a dyspeptic Giuseppe Zangara, who shot at Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 and killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead.

The more contemporary assassins are fruitcakes and wackos, like Samuel Byck, played with frenzy by Mario Cantone, who hijacked a jet to try to crash into Nixon's White House in 1974. Mary Catherine Garrison is Fromme and Becky Ann Baker is Sara Jane Moore, two sublime performances as dimwits who tried to scratch Gerald Ford in 1975. Alexander Gemignani is Hinckley, who tried to kill Ronald Reagan in order to impress actress Foster.

Neil Patrick Harris is a balladeer who serves as a lyrical narrator at various points in the tale, and then morphs into a reclusive, suicidal Lee Harvey Oswald at the finale. He's goaded by the others to kill someone besides himself and ensure immortality via fame (or infamy, as the case is) for everyone in the club. Instead of a silhouette target, director Mantello symbolizes the act by playing a home movie across Oswald's T-shirt -- the one showing Jackie Kennedy's horror as she leans across the moving car. That, and the ensuing dirge "Something Just Broke", is guaranteed to mist the eyes of anyone old enough to remember Nov. 22, 1963.

Great drama? Only in the historical sense. Assassins is musical theater the way Ken Burns would probably do it if he could be coaxed away from his camera.

Jack Zink is covering New York theater as Broadway and off-Broadway head for the season's annual awards.

Jack Zink can be reached at jzink@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4706.

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