The tragic tale of Camelot and President Kennedy endures

But several musicals that look at the shooting of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas, on the morning of November 22, 1963, have been hits in other countries as well as the US.

The composers and writers of the musicals, including an opera, have put together shows that have very different natures, while sticking closely to what happened and the real-life characterisations of the people.

And they have not been devoid of humour, though much of it has been dark.

The first show, JFK: A Musical Drama, had its initial major seasons in Dublin and London in 1997 after a premiere season at the University of Oklahoma in 1995 under the title Jack, A Musical Drama.

It later became Jack: A Musical Drama on the Life of John F. Kennedy, and also was billed as a concert production, when it had another Broadway staging in 2013.

The show's music was composed by Will Holt, who also shared the writing of the lyrics with Tom Sawyer.

The musical began with JFK's days as a student at Harvard University, and showed his subsequent painful relationship with his obsessively dominating father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.

His father repeatedly told him he wasn't as astute as his older brother, Joe Jr, who, Joe Snr kept telling him, was going to become the first Catholic president of the US.

But after Joe Jr died during a bombing mission in World War II, the father demanded that Jack should take his place by entering politics.

While Jack was initially reluctant to run for Congress, his election led to him developing a passion to make America better. And, once he was elected, he determinedly tried to make his relationships with other family members more comfortable and rewarding for them.

He got on well with his mother, Rose, and her father, and shared his idealistic views with younger brother Bobby.

But while most people saw Jack and his wife Jacqueline Bouvier, who was known as Jackie, as an ideal couple, she was unhappy about his philandering.

Another American play that looked at Kennedy's life and murder, Kennedy: A Musical Celebration.

It's book, music and lyrics were written by Leslie Bricusse, who also wrote song scores for films including Willy Wonka the Chocolate Factory, and title songs for James Bond films including Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, and Allan J. Friedman, premiered

In 2016, a very different examination of the circumstances that led to Kennedy's assassination, JFK, billed as "a grand opera", premiered at Fort Worth in Texas, where Jack and Jackie Kennedy spent the night before Jack's murder.

The musical was put together by composer David T. Little and librettist Royce Vavrek at the request of the Fort Worth Opera Company.

It looked at the last 24 hours in the lives of the Kennedy couple.

The musical had a team of characters, known as "mythological fates", who guide the sleeping couple as they recall incidents in their lives.

Another 2016 American play, The Tragedy of JFK (as told by William Shakespeare), by Eric A. Gordon and Dale Greenfield, premiered in Los Angeles, grafted the JFK saga onto Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, which also has its title character assassinated.

Actor, writer, director and producer Daniel Henning, who staged the play, had spent more than three decades researching and reflecting on the JFK assassination.

He noted that he came up with the idea of putting the 1963 slaying of JFK into the Julius Caesar context while reading the Shakespeare play.

"The connections to people and situations directly paralleled those of the JFK story," he pointed out.

It took Henning two decades to get the story grafted into a long one-act play. The dying words of JFK, for example, reflect those of Caesar: "Et tu, Lyndon".

It is a reference to the equally tragic murder of JFK's younger brother, Robert F. Kennedy, in Los Angeles less than five years later, just as he was launching his own run for the presidency against his brother's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.

In 2019, a new musical, Oswald, which has President Kennedy's killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, as its central character, had performances at intimate venues in New York and other major centres.

The musical, by songwriters Tony LePage and John Sassanella, looks through 27 songs at the impacts of the slaying.

Told through the eyes of his now elderly widowed wife, Oswald explores two possible versions of the accused assassin's journey simultaneously.

Oswald is led through the basement of the Dallas Police headquarters, with one side of the story following a troubled youth caught up in an impossible situation, which ultimately leads to the conspiracy theories many believe to this day.

In the other, a cold-blooded killer is seen driven mad by his unrelenting need to be remembered.