Bravery is staging a play about the secret lives of political assassins on the anniversary of Obama taking office. Though, Assassins, Stephen Sondheim’s satire of the American wills of those who kill presidents is nearly 20-years-old, it feels more shockingly relevant than most political art produced in the decades to follow, proving no matter whose doctrine we’re following, someone has to die.

Staged with immense consideration by Dora-recipients Birdland Theatre, Assassins unfolds in the darkened bunker-like quarters of The Theatre Centre — the perfect lair for a bunch of murderers. The stage is draped in white, blue and blood, as the play opens with a target-practice sequence resounding with balloon gunshots. This tone of sardonic violence is appropriate, and follows throughout the arresting show.

Forced to conspire in a series of staged confrontational songs that mimics the musical styles of the era (that’s Sousa marches, ragtime dances and FM soft-rock), the celebrity assassins include Abraham Lincoln killer John Wilkes Booth, James Garfield assassin Charles Julius Guiteau, William McKinley murderer Leon Frank Czolgosz, would-be FDR-offer Giuseppe Zangara, Richard Nixon nemesis Samuel Byck, Ronald Reagan-almost assassin John Warnock Hinckley, Jr., and Gerald Ford-attemptresses Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme and Sara Jane Moore, plus the infamous Lee Harvey Oswald in a memorable deus ex machina. Onstage they drift around like phantoms, playing musical instruments that make up a full band when they’re not reciting dialogue seemingly cribbed from a doomed Sartre dissertation on the futility of the American dream.

As Sondheim’s biting and non-harmonic melodies maintain, “everybody’s got the right to their dreams.” John Weidman’s book makes each assassin’s motivations clear and sweetly relatable — from Samuel Byck’s failed ambition to John Hinckley’s Jr.’s obsessive love for Jodie Foster. (His duet with Charles Manson-devotee Squeaky Fromme has the two kissing portraits squashed against each other’s lips.) Most actors make their characters staggeringly life-like. Steve Ross plays his Charles Julius Guiteau with swarthy delusion, nicely turning a comic character into a bleak delusional freak. Eliza-Jane Scott finds a gawky charm in Sara Jane Moore’s housewife killer, though she often goes for overblown hand gestures and vocal histrionics — especially in a scene smoking pot with a wide-eyed Manson-lover.

Assassins’ star, though, is Graham Abbey, playing Samuel Byck. Clad in a Santa suit, speaking manically on a recorder to idol Leonard Bernstein about the life he was meant to lead, Abbey veritably kills. And yet each actor maintains their own sad dramas — just observe a makeshift barbershop trio of Booth, Guiteau and Czolgosz imploring, “All you have to do is move your little finger — and you can change the world.”