Now, you have to negotiate your way through a construction site of makeshift walkways and steel-piped scaffolding caused by the massive hotel going up on Eighth Avenue. Inside the disco-turned-theatre, on stage, there is more scaffolding—three-tiered, blackened plank paneling cleverly designed by Robert Brill to suggest everything from Ford's Theatre in Washington to the Dallas Book Depository.

It has taken 13 years for the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical Assassins to travel 14 blocks from Off Broadway (Playwrights Horizons) to Broadway (Studio 54)—a rough road, riddled with detours caused by national crises and the difficulty of the controversial material, but, on April 22, at long last, it made its Main Stem beachhead.

"When you see something finally come in for a landing the way this show did with this production, it's just hugely satisfying," said Weidman, who was quick to credit the show's success to its director, Joe Mantello. "Joe just did a great job. He fills the stage. He has made it enormously theatrical. I feel very grateful to him and to all the people who participated in realizing what Steve and I sat out to write in the first place 13 years ago. This production feels like the absolute finished version of what we wanted to do."

A ritzy set of first-nighters roared their approval and, after the show, winded their way down Eighth Avenue—again through scaffolding and walkways—to the China Club on West 47th for the post-premiere celebration. Its black box ambiance was entirely apt.

Those with green tickets were directed four flights up—it could have been three, but it played like four—to the Jade Terrace where even the most jaded were agog at the Manhattan skyline on display. (The room comes with a retractable roof.) Press interviews were done on the second landing, and the serious partying was done on the third.

One terrace table of oohs and aahs represented some hands-across-the-pond Anglo-American exchanging: City of Angels' Tony winning David Zippel did the lyrics for the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, The Woman in White, which will open Sept. 15 in London starring Michael Crawford and Maria Friedman; designer Scott Pask created the sets for The Pillowman, the London hit that has been Broadway-dated for October; and Thoroughly Modern Millie's Tony-winning choreographer, Rob Ashford, is off to London soon to set a revival of Forum a-struttin' for director Edward Hall.

Songwriter Maury Yeston, twice-Tony-ed for Nine and Titanic, was leading cheers for Assassins in one corner of the terrace. "If you look at the performers, they're extraordinary," he trilled. "Two of them are Titanic graduates, y'know—Michael Cerveris and Becky Ann Baker. When you have people like that, how can you go wrong? And James Barbour, also. He was wonderfully intense and should be singled out."

Yeston's next? "Death Takes a Holiday," he beamed. "We're going to do it on Broadway next year. I've done the score, and the book was written by Peter Stone. He finished it completely and polished it, right before he died. This will be Peter's 19th musical."

And it will be directed by . . . ? Yeston gestured to the gentleman on his left, David Leveaux, who directed last season's revival of Nine, and the current revivals of Fiddler on the Roof and Jumpers.

Patrick Cassidy seemed to be lone representative of the original Off-Broadway Assassins in attendance. He was accompanying his mom, Shirley Jones. The two of them are in town rehearsing 42nd Street.

"It's so close to my heart, this show," Cassidy said of Assassins. "I'm so glad it's here on Broadway. To see it on that scale and hear it was that orchestra! It was long time coming."

In the original production, Cassidy played the young balladeer who wanders through the show in a narrator capacity. In this version, the character turns into Lee Harvey Oswald—a change Cassidy heartily approves of: "`Another National Anthem' is so clear to me now, more than when I did it at Playwrights—the whole idea that it can happen to anyone."

The creme de la creme of musical theatre actors came out for this Assassins just as they did for the original. In some cases, the casting is just a generational jump from the first cast. It's easy to imagine Barbour in the role originated by Terrence Mann, Leon Czolgosz who's smitten with Emma Goldman (Thoroughly Modern Millie's Anne L. Nathan). "I tell people I have to do Rum Tum Tiger next. The Beast, Shogun—I seem to follow Terry in every role he does," said Barbour. (At least he beat Mann to Jane Eyre's Rochester.)

Becky Ann Baker is the logical 2004 choice to follow Debra Monk as the most improbable, and comical, wannabe assassin, Sarah Jane Moore. "I think the fact that I didn't actually hit President Ford with a bullet makes it a lot easier to be funny," she reasoned. "John Weidman has come up with a lot of amazing things about her that all happen to be true. She did have five marriages. She did have four kids. She did grow up in the same town that Charles Manson grew up in. John really did his homework."

Becky's hubby, Dylan Baker is off to Mexico City to do "Matador," a film with Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear, and play "a secret agent of sorts," as he did in Brosnan's "The Tailor of Panama."