Dashing in traffic up to Evanston to see director Darryl Brooks’ intimate new Theo production of “Assassins” Monday night, the song “Something Just Broke” already was pulsing my foot on the accelerator.

As Stephen Sondheim aficionados well know, that’s the stunner of a song the great composer inserted into this pageant of self-actualizing presidential killers (and wannabe killers) to reflect the other side, the huge social impact of the sudden assassination of a political leader. Therein, a bunch of ordinary Americans sing their memory of what they were doing when John F. Kennedy was shot: “And I wondered,” they sing, one at a time. “I was scared of what would follow. Something to be mended. Made me wonder who we are.”

Concise lyrics like that, which feel like they could have been written about the last few weeks, are what made Sondheim incomparably Sondheim.

Not quite God. In the overall case of “Assassins,” it’s long been my view that this 1991 collaboration with John Weidman didn’t fully marry the varied stylistic intentions of composer and bookwriter. To put that another way, the show dared to tackle something incredibly disturbing, pervasive and seemingly unfixable within the American psyche and in the end, couldn’t match the gravitas of its own mission.

Moreover, I think what we’ve learned since 1991 is that the attention-seeking impulse that has motivated those who point their guns at a president is no longer confined to threats against chief executives. In this city, as with many others, a modern production of “Assassins” will always put its audience in mind of the scourge of gun violence. Not sure Weidman and Sondheim anticipated that. How could they?

But Sondheim was a moralist only with it came to the existential power of love. As it takes you through the parade of miscreants (John Wilkes Booth, Leon Czolgosz, John Hinckley and so on), with their twisted interpretation of the all-American right to pursue happiness, “Assassins” often implies their presence is an inevitability, a counterweight that must be born in subjectivity to the benefits of freedom and the Constitution.

The show is profoundly cynical, often an effective point of view for a musical, but somehow always troubling here because the existence of this impulse to shoot is so singularly productive of human pain. “Assassins” is always hard to watch, and yet usually worth the effort. This one, flawed and uneven as it can be, is still an impressive, risk-taking exploration of the title. It’s well worth seeing by those who love … well, you know who you are.

Brooks traps you in the room with these characters (the assassins ever take over the bar) and has cast actors willing to take deep dives. Many of them sing exceptionally well under Heidi Joosten’s musical direction: Not for the first time I thought that Patrick O’Keefe is one of Chicago’s best young musical-theater talents and if Neala Barron, a highlight of many a storefront musical over the last decade or so, were to put out a shingle advertising “Neala Barron Sings Sondheim,” I’d be there with my Heineken.

In general, my main critique of Brooks’ very interesting and intense production is a perennial danger with this particular title: the characters are so weird and perversely compelling that it is easy for the actors to disappear up the barrels of their guns and into their skulls, at the expense of the show’s overall milieu. They’re all crazy, but they’re us, too, and we have to be able to see that better than we can at Theo. (Theo Ubique, this long-lived company’s former name, has been retired.)

Along those lines, I only wish that “Something Just Broke” had come with all of the emotional weight it can carry. I think this young cast could bring that along, here and elsewhere, as the show has its run, if they can just snap into the pain of the everyday. Here in our world, where one person’s self-actualization, or even their declaration of unworthiness, can mean someone else’s obliteration.

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Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

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Review: “Assassins” (3 stars)

When: Through Dec. 17

Where: Theo, 721 Howard St., Evanston

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Tickets: $35-$59 (preshow dinner is $33) at 773-939-4101 and theo-u.com