Musicalizing the Legend
Marriott’s 1776 provides a bold reinterpretation of the Founding Fathers.
When legend becomes fact, musicalize the legend (to paraphrase John Ford). Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone follow this strategy again and again over the course of their rousing 1969 musical about the events leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Facts are ignored, chronology twisted, dramatic moments invented—all in the name of transforming history into theater gold (the original production garnered six Tony nominations and three wins, including best musical).
But who cares? The show works. By turns it’s witty, wise, entertaining, and even suspenseful, managing to put us on the edge of our seats wondering if the American Revolution will even happen, or if this now hallowed document will ever be signed.
To be sure two-plus hours can, in a weak production, seem long for such a short story, even with Edwards’s wonderful tunes. However, in reviving the show, the folks at Marriott Theatre have put together a tight, spritely paced, exceptionally well-acted production that capitalizes on everything that makes this show strong and gracefully underplays its greatest weakness (that is, a show almost entirely about white patriarchs establishing a new patriarchy) by extensive gender- and color-blind casting, a choice that, much like Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, presages our much more democratic democracy than the one John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and others were forging.
And what a powerful cast the director, Nick Bowling, has assembled here. Tyrick Wiltez Jones makes a powerful Adams, the show’s protagonist, owning the stage whenever he speaks and sings. And Lucy Godinez is utterly charming as Virginia scion Richard Henry Lee (played here as a comic character). But the revelation in the show is Heidi Kettenring’s star turn as Pennsylvanian delegate and Adams antagonist John Dickinson. (Dickinson’s real role around the Declaration is more complicated than the musical suggests.) Her performance is so strong as the flinty Dickinson I started daydreaming about Kettenring in other roles—Hamlet, Henry Higgins, Hamilton. When there is another 1776 revival, I hope she is cast as Adams himself.
