In this case, for example, why does Sondheim write some clever, complex music that draws on a whole range of American styles - from blues to Sousa to light rock - about nine people who tried, some of them successfully, to shoot a president? And why does Company One, which is giving the show a spare but solid production at the Boston Center for the Arts, ask us to spend 90 minutes in a dark room with these obsessive killers?
For Sondheim fanatics, the answer is obvious: It's the music, stupid. And Company One gives the music its due, with a small but excellent band conducted by José Delgado and some very accomplished young singers. It seems strange that all of them are miked - this is a pretty small space, after all - but Aaron Mack's sound design is unobtrusive, and the voices generally blend well.
The singers mesh especially in the big opening number, "Everybody's Got the Right," in the truly weird rock ballad "Unworthy of Your Love" (sung by John Hinckley Jr. and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme to the absent Jodie Foster and Charles Manson, respectively), and in the dissonant, dyspeptic "Another National Anthem" that brings the show to its climax.
Nik Walker, as the Balladeer, is particularly strong and charismatic. As John Wilkes Booth, meanwhile, David DaCosta has a fetchingly crazy gleam in his eye. Though his singing occasionally escalates into yelling, mostly he keeps the passion tuned to the right pitch.
And Shawn LaCount directs the entire cast with focus and contained intensity. Even the cruel-silly tone of much of Weidman's book - the ridiculous scene, say, in which Squeaky and fellow failed Ford assassin Sara Jane Moore take target practice with a bucket of fried chicken - here at least feels intentional, if not intelligent.
