Writing in the New York Times today, Frank Rich reflects on a current production of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, now playing in the Big Apple. I saw (and reviewed, back in my theatre critic days) a production of Assassins at the Berkeley Street Theatre in Toronto. I like Sondheim a lot and one of the reasons I do is that his work is like Shakespeare in that it is tremendously malleable and invites the most creative interpretations you can bring to the work.
When I saw Assassins it was the mid-90s and there were folks, mostly nuts we believed, who wanted to take pot-shots at the world's leaders.
Nowadays, of course, we are in a post-9/11 world, as Rich notes, and Assassins in New York, certainly, loses some of its earlier malleability.
Rich's column also notes that we will see this summer a re-make of The Manchurian Candidate and it will be impossible not to view it (in fact, the film's creators are riffing off of it, apparently) in light of the events of September, 2001.