“Shoot & Win”: This is the phrase that greets audience members of SDA’s production of “Assassins” moments before the show begins, along with some mild heckling from an onstage proprietor. Such a transactional interaction with audience members sets the stage for the musical’s first song: “Everybody’s Got The Right,” in which said proprietor sells pistols to nine would-be assassins: “You wanna shoot a president? / C’mon and shoot a president!”

“Assassins” opened Apr. 18 at McClintock Theatre, running for five performances. The musical explores the motives of assassins through the lens of nine historical figures — all of whom assassinated or attempted to assassinate a United States president.

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Characters range from infamous killers, such as John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, to more obscure felons, like Charles Guiteau and Samuel Byck. The show features a book by John Weidman with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

As one of SDA’s Second Stage productions, the cast consisted entirely of second-year musical theatre students, marking the class’ first cohort show. Although Second Stage productions are typically executed on a relatively small technical scale, the show’s clever staging and production design allowed for actors to thoroughly utilize the compact performing space.

The theater was adorned with various reworkings of the American flag in pennants, wooden blocks and even a makeshift turntable — alluding to the twisted patriotism motivating many of the show’s assassins.

Neema Muteti, who played the proprietor, described her character’s involvement with the other assassins as antagonistic.

“The proprietor is in a system where she isn’t at the forefront [and] she isn’t winning. She decides to profit off that system and sell the guns that are used to keep her down,” Muteti said. “In the process of that, she continues to be cast aside … She becomes this almost antagonist to the assassins.”

Aside from Muteti, every character was modeled after a real person. Bruno Koskoff, who played Booth, took to the stage as a true Southern gentleman. Koskoff effortlessly captured the charisma of Lincoln’s killer, down to his handlebar mustache and antiquated walking stick.

Portraying another famed assassin, Mekhi Wallace expertly grasped Lee Harvey Oswald’s quiet discontentment. Near the end of the show, the characters embrace before Booth and the seven other assassins ask Oswald to kill John F. Kennedy, thereby cementing their place in history: “Make us proud / All you have to do is squeeze your little finger.”

With the exception of Booth and Oswald, the majority of the musical’s characters are unknown to audience members before the show. The exploration of these forgotten criminals is precisely what makes “Assassins” so interesting.

As Guiteau, an author with aspirations to become the ambassador to Paris, Eugene Boyd was larger than life. Boyd brought a vaudevillian quality to Guiteau, artfully highlighting the melodrama underscoring Guiteau’s assassination of James Garfield in “The Ballad of Guiteau” through jazz squares and exaggerated facial expressions.

Matt Dean’s performance as Byck was no less melodramatic, imbuing the second half of the show with sardonic humor. As his character broke down in a series of taped rants directed at Leonard Bernstein and Richard Nixon, Dean simultaneously wowed and terrified audience members — an impressive feat given his costuming of a Santa suit.

Humanizing such infamous individuals required heavy research from students. Learning about what these figures were like before they were assassins was integral to the creative process.

“We were able to do a really deep dive into who these people really were,” Boyd said.

Upon researching their characters, students began exploring the physicality of the assassins.

“We started by just walking around and finding what the posture and who the characters were in our bodies,” Boyd said. “That was the most helpful thing to tap into somebody that was so crazy, but also has some sort of humanity to them in order to play them right.”

The primary conflict poised to actors, then, was reconciling the assassins’ crimes with their humanity.

“[I was really dealing with] giving grace to these characters, but also remembering at the same time they were assassins,” said Leilani Rodriguez, who played Sara Jane Moore. “They were complicated people.”

Students wanted audience members to reflect on these complexities after the show.

“I hope people came, they enjoyed it, and they laughed, but I also hope that afterwards, they wonder why they laughed and if it was really that funny,” Muteti said, remarking on the seriousness of the topics discussed.

Touching on themes of alienation and ill-intentioned patriotism, SDA’s production of “Assassins” provided insight into the individual stories accompanying long-rebuked figures of history. The motley crew of felons assembled at McClintock Theatre this weekend reminded audience members of the dangers associated with pursuing the American Dream.

“Ultimately, the story ends the way it began,” Muteti said.