DO you stick with your plans to revive Stephen Sondheim’s most unpleasant musical or do you shelve it in favor of a “cursed” new show by Kander and Ebb?

That’s the hard choice facing Todd Haimes, artistic director of the non-profit Roundabout Theater Company.

Haimes has announced plans to revive Sondheim’s “Assassins,” directed by Joe Mantello, this spring. But raising money for this intellectually muddled musical about presidential assassins – during the current war on terror – is proving difficult.

Haimes is seeking outside financing for the show (the risk is too great for the theater to shoulder alone) and is said to be more than $1 million short.

With “Assassins” an iffy proposition at best, Sam Cohen, the legendary agent who reps John Kander and Fred Ebb, is quietly pressuring the Roundabout to replace it with the songwriting team’s new musical, “The Visit.”

Fortune has not, however, smiled on that show, which was produced last year to good reviews at Chicago’s Goodman Theater.

It’s been derailed four times in the last four years on its way to New York.

Just two weeks ago it was dropped from the Public Theater’s fall season after one of its co-producers withdrew $500,000.

The Roundabout would pick up the Public’s production, which comes with two stars – Chita Rivera and Frank Langella.

Kander and Ebb have a lot of leverage with the Roundabout – the theater pocketed several million dollars from its long-running revival of their musical “Cabaret.”

Surely some of those profits can and should be plowed back into a new Kander and Ebb show, especially since this may be its last chance of getting a production in New York.

“I probably have not right to be, but I am hopeful that it will get on,” Fred Ebb told The Post yesterday. “I love this show, and from what I understand Todd is enthusiastic about it, too.”

A spokesman for the Roundabout said Haimes did indeed like “The Visit” but that the theater was still planning to produce “Assassins” in the spring “if the money can be raised.”

Ah, but if it can’t, then “Assassins” is as dead as Abe Lincoln.

And would that be such a bad thing?

This musical, which was first produced off-Broadway in 1991, leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

At times it seems to argue that John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, Squeaky Fromme and their ilk were themselves “victims” – driven to commit their crimes by a ruthless America that rewards winners and leaves losers and misfits behind.

At other times, it throws up its hands and says the assassins and would-be assassins were just creeps and lunatics – and then scores cheap laughs off their eccentricities.

No less a Sondheim acolyte than Frank Rich, reviewing the show in The New York Times, called it “confused,” “sketchy” and “disappointing.”

“Tasteless,” “nasty” and “insensitive” might be more apt assessments of the show in a post-Sept. 11 America, and it’s not surprising that some Roundabout board members have deep misgiving about reviving it at this time.

If “Assassins” falls through, Haimes will still have to find money for “The Visit.”

It’s a dark show (a rich woman returns to her hometown to destroy the man who done her wrong), and is too risky for the theater to produce alone.

Kander and Ebb have made tens of millions of dollars off the revivals of “Chicago” and “Cabaret” and some theater people think they might put up some of the money for “The Visit.” But Ebb laughed off the suggestion.

“I’m like Buffalo Bill,” he joked. “I don’t put my money into show business. I was poor for so long, and now I just want to be rich as long as I was poor.”

Haimes could probably get the money out of his investors in “Cabaret.”

They’ve gotten rich off one Kander and Ebb show, so why not kick a little of it back to the Roundabout for “The Visit”?

‘BRIGHT Lights Big City,” the musical version of Jay McInerney’s best-selling novel, is being presented in concert form Sept. 14 and 15 at 8 p.m. at the Guggenheim Museum. The show, by Paul Scott Goodman, will star Broadway performers Gavin Creel, Norm Lewis and Maya Days.

Goodman and McInerney will discuss the show, part of the Guggenheim’s Works & Process series, after the performance.

For tickets, which are $18, call (212) 423-3587.