The <em>1776</em> Project
“Few historic incidents seem more unlikely to spawn a Broadway musical than that solemn moment in the history of mankind, the signing of the Declaration of Independence,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times in 1969. The United States was coming unglued. Yet the critic, an acerbic Englishman, felt his heart set aflutter by Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards’s 1776. The musical had “captured the Spirit of ’76,” Barnes enthused. The editors headlined his rave “Founding Fathers’ Tale Is a Happy Musical.”
Earlier this month, as the United States was once again coming unglued, the splashiest, most provocative of many revivals of 1776 opened on Broadway. A co-production of the American Repertory Theater and the Roundabout Theatre Company, this new 1776 means less to reanimate the nation’s founding than to talk back—or even down—to it. These days, many Americans are a good deal less sure that happiness of any sort can be wrested from the pursuits of Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Framers. And so, in this latest production, the key has changed from major to minor.
For more than five decades, 1776 has set the history wars to music and danced them backwards, in high-button shoes. There’s a good chance you’ve seen some version of it, most likely the 1972 feature film. It was a family hit; advance ticket sales at Radio City Music Hall were the largest in the venue’s history. Maybe your high school staged it, with white tube socks pulled over fraying corduroys.
But in case you’ve inexplicably missed this goofy cultural touchstone, a quick synopsis: The show dramatizes the deliberations of the Second Continental Congress in the spring of 1776. Most of the action is set in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. The cast consists of 20 members of Congress spread across 13 delegations, along with several functionaries and two delegates’ wives. (Abigail Adams appears via letters, and Martha Jefferson visits Philadelphia to, um, inspire her husband, who is suffering from writer’s
