How do you solve problems like America?
For the makers of the musical 1776, the answer was to wrap the dramatization of the debate over the Declaration of Independence with light tunes, 18th-century double entenders, and twisted dialogue to make it feel like a thriller.
The musical, which premiered on Broadway in 1969, ran for 1,217 performances, won a Tony Award for best musical, and over the past 50 years has been a trove of stories about how such resolutely square shows have triumphed in Vietnam. I’ve been scratching my head. America of the era.
But 1776 is different than before. In 2022, the touchstone of national identity has become the hot potato of the culture wars. Nor is 1776, which hits Broadway this month as a new revival of his company at the Roundabout Theater.
Directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus, this revival has a familiar rousing melody (with a new, rock-infused arrangement), a star-studded color scheme, and corny dad jokes. But they’re delivered by a racially diverse cast of female, nonbinary, and transgender actors whose embodiment awakens language, Paulus said.
In a video interview after the show ended last month, Paulus said, “Let audiences see the dual reality of what the founders were and that they were a company of actors in 2022 and were never allowed into Independence Hall.” I want you to hug me,” he said. It was performed before Broadway at the American Her Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is artistic director.
Using phrases like the show’s mantra, she said, “It’s not about positive myths, it’s about holding history as a predicament.”
Announced in 2019, this revival may have seemed on the bandwagon for all post-‘Hamilton’ founders at first, but one thing stands out for that show’s overarching casting. But the pandemic’s two-year delay, which saw nationwide racial justice protests, a hotly contested presidential election, and the Jan. 6 uprising, only raised the stakes.
“The deeper you go into it, the more poetry and stuff there is in it,” Paige said in another video interview.
At the bottom, “1776,” he said, “about a secret meeting of people desperate to change the world.”
Again, “1776” was not the whitewashed retro-patriotic celebration it is often remembered for. Composed of songs by history teacher-turned-Brill Building tuner Sherman Edwards and playwright Peter his Stone book, the show is all about its traditionalist wig-wearing men in appearance. On the other hand, it was pointed out politically as much as “Hamilton”. (and perhaps some more so).
Written prior to the Bicentennial, it was intended to humanize the Founder. We are nothing more and nothing less,” declares Benjamin Franklin, while challenging what the author calls the school-learned history of “jingoism.”
I had a bite of a song like “Mom, look at me” A denunciation of war carnage that could have been sung by the GI of Hamburger Hill.and there was “Rum from molasses” A chilling call to support freedom of New England collusion in the interests of slavery.
The piece even caused its own minor controversy. When cast members were invited to perform the show at the Nixon White House, they were asked to cut “cool, cool, caring men.” Right, never left. (They declined.)
“‘Oh, it’s 1776! I love musicals. That’s what our country needs!'” Paulus said. “What are they talking about?”
But then, when touring production company NETworks first pitched the show to her as a possible revival in February 2019, she said it hit “Hair” (which she directed a Broadway revival in 2009). Little did I know about it, except that I beat it. for Tony. “I had a vague idea that it was like celebrating American history,” she said.
When she read the book, on a long flight, she said, “I almost fell off the plane.”
In particular, she was struck by the dramatic climax. The debate over Thomas Jefferson’s lashing out at the slave trade was eventually dropped from the proclamation for unanimous approval.
Even speaking now, Paulus sounds incredible. “I wasn’t aware of that crossout,” she said. “How did you not know?”
“That’s where the journey to the show begins,” she continued. “I had to consider my own experience of American history.”
2016 encore! A racially diverse casting was already used in staging the concert in New York. Paulus said she was told immediately that the estate would open up to an all-female cast, but she stressed that the production doesn’t do much with a “binary” look at gender.
The first reading took place in New York in August 2019, with leading actors including Crystal Lucas Perry playing the hot-tempered and stubborn John Adams, leader of the ‘Independence’ clique. By early March 2020, the show was fully cast and he was set to open in Cambridge in May, followed by a national tour and Broadway performances.
Instead, they retreated to Zoom like other theaters in America. According to Paulus, without the pressure of putting on a show, he was able to delve deeper into American history, including meetings with various academics like political theorists. Daniel Allen and a historian Vincent BrownJane Kamensky, Annette Gordon Reid.
With the approval of the creator’s estate, the show contains a (unspoken) depiction of a 14-year-old Robert HemmingsJefferson’s slave slave (and brother of Sally Hemings), inspired by Gordon Reed ScholarshipIt also adds a lengthy excerpt from Abigail Adams’ famous letter admonishing John, “Don’t forget the women.”
The gender-flipped casting may be the show’s assertion to “firstness,” but the core of the production is its engagement with race.
Even before George Floyd was murdered, discussions of race within the company were “very graphic,” Paulus said. Protests followed, and an open letter titled “We See You, White American Theater” started a lively conversation about racism, representation and hierarchy in the theater.
In September 2020, the American Repertory Theater unveiled the initial set. anti-racism promiseAs for “1776,” she said the conversation sparked by the protests “influenced everything about our process.”
Paulus said he met Paige for the first time (that long resume As a choreographer, he has collaborated with Beyoncé on many occasions), and in 2017 started an MFA program for direction in Columbia. He was originally hired as the show’s choreographer in 2019. In the summer of 2020, he also became a co-director.
“I felt that the most powerful and honest reflection of our collaboration was that we were ‘equal’,” said Paulus.
The George Floyd moment “changed everything” for the show, agreed Page. The team, including set designer Scott His Pask, had already begun to move away from the original background designs, which Page described as trying to land the show in a “world of realism”.
“We got together and said this doesn’t feel right anymore,” he said. “We started asking what the piece was about when we got to the heart of it.
“They were men who were going to change the world,” he continued. “Who cares what chairs they sat in?”
With its understated Brecht-influenced design, the piece is set on stage in 2022 rather than at Independence Hall in 1776, where a troupe of contemporary actors arrive in plain clothes and don it without fanfare. will be performed before Their 18th century (ish) waistcoat and period shoes.
(One performer also wears a beaded necklace — a seeming nod to that fact, as mentioned in Stone and Edward’s original) author’s noteNative American leaders often appear before the Continental Congress as leaders of independent nations.)
Page, who has other recent directing credits including this summer’s revival of “Ain’t Misbehavin'” at the Burlington Stage Company, said the black cast helped guide the show’s exploration of race. He also mentioned the importance of an ‘affinity space’ for the members.
“The main thing we communicated with the other cast members was, ‘You’re going to feel something.’ That was it.”
In a group interview with the show’s four founding “fathers,” Elizabeth A. Davis, who plays Jefferson, said that as part of her exploration of how personal and national histories intersect, cast members I remembered the video conference where we announced our family tree. She said she still remembers exactly where she sat. She was “in my grandmother’s old room in the middle of Texas,” as she described a black colleague as she hit the wall of so-called slavery.
“It was a deep moment for me,” she said. “It was about understanding something not just intellectually, but viscerally and cellularly.”
Lucas Perry nodded. “I remember her saying, ‘I’m a little lonely,'” she said.
Lucas-Perry said the 2020 protests were a result of “overrecognition” of how casting changes the meaning of text and the importance of works with diverse bodies “just because they are possible.” said to have contributed to
“Our contribution to the history of making is our bodies, our physical selves,” she said. I was looking for a way to do it.”
“Momma, Look Sharp” was written by a black woman (loud-voiced Salome B. Smith as a courier carrying news from the front) to another black woman after the founder’s “father” left the room. sung in different ways. (The courier’s stabbing “Mama!” Page said, echoing Floyd’s yell as she gasped.)
But the show’s dark heart is the silky, ominous “Moraces to Lamb.”Traditionally, it is presented as a vocal tour de force (John Cullum’s Stentorian baritone 1972 film), critics have often paid more attention to the song than to its chilling content.
In staging the song (sung by Sarah Porcarob), Paige and Paulus make the audience think about the enslaved people that form the enslaved corner. triangular trade Not as an abstraction, but as an entity assembled in a wordless chorus involving black actors playing Adams, Franklin, and John Hancock. (The sometimes defiant choreography recreates some gestures from “cool, cool, caring men,” Page said.)
Carolee Carmelo, who is in a Broadway production as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania (one of the cool, conservative men), played Abigail Adams in the 1997 Broadway revival. She’d heard “Treacle” hundreds of times, but she wasn’t ready to see it in the new production.
“It’s very powerful to understand what they’re actually discussing,” she said.
Lucas-Perry said that the song “feels like it goes on forever”, referring to slavery, saying that it “has actually gone on forever”. “I’m not going to lie,” she said of the scene.
“Hamilton” is fundamentally celebratory, reflecting the liberal optimism of Obama-era America and a sense of the winding arc of history. Page and Paulus’ 1776, despite its humor and vitality, is darker and uncertain.
But neither show is the final word on founding or proclamation. This is a document that could be considered the ultimate American classic. Expired and flawed, but also profound and visionary, in need of constant revival and reinterpretation. To stay alive, change the cast of Americans.
Page summed up the core of 1776 and “1776” succinctly: