1776
Opening Night: January 1, 1970
Theater: American Airlines
Website: www.roundabouttheatre.org
What will it take to get two dozen powerfully passionate, exceedingly complicated, and all-too-human individuals to settle their differences, while they hold the very future of a nation in their hands? This Tony Award-winning Best Musical is tuneful, funny, and constantly surprising, especially in this revolutionary new production from directors Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus, featuring a cast that represents a range of races, ethnicities, and genders: the folks who weren’t included in the original founding of America. You may never think about this country the same way again.
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October 6, 2022
The diversity of this cast is astonishing and worthy of celebration. I am overjoyed that these performers are getting paid, getting work, and getting to be on Broadway, many of them for the first time. I hope to see many more ensembles like this in the future. Having said that, beyond the cast, there was little I was able to enjoy in this production.
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October 6, 2022
If that sort of complication were itself great theater and not just a promising premise, this “1776” might be amazing. That the production is instead so overpumped and overplayed as to be hardly comprehensible is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of the musical, which is plenty complicated as written — if not so much in its few and often trite songs, by Sherman Edwards, then at least in Peter Stone’s book, a masterpiece of condensation without diminishment.
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October 6, 2022
In this take on the musical — which is receiving its second revival from Roundabout Theatre Company (the first was in 1997) — an ethnically diverse chorale of women, trans and nonbinary performers are our revolutionaries. Unfortunately, this choice, which genuinely makes the sedative of a show more interesting to look at and listen to, further locks its subjects into binary stereotypes.
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October 6, 2022
The American-history musical 1776 is not, in itself, unfamiliar: Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s tunefully educational account of the process leading up to the Declaration of Independence was a hit in 1969, and its 1972 film adaptation soon became a television staple; it has since returned in major productions on Broadway (in 1997) and in the Encores! concert series (in 2016). Yet the Roundabout’s latest revival of the show doesn’t feel stiff: It infuses this august body of show with a rush of fresh blood.
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October 6, 2022
Utterly lacking is any point of view when the female, transgender or nonbinary actors put on men’s clothes in the new revival of “1776,” which opened Thursday at Roundabout’s American Airline Theatre.
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October 6, 2022
I admire the considerable thought and enterprise that went into creating this production, while still finding to be overwhelmingly problematic and frustrating, especially in the over-the-top manner that many songs have been reconceived. It is full of provocative images and questionable choices that are worthy of extended analysis and debate.
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October 6, 2022
The opening moments of this exuberant, thought-provoking and radical revival of “1776” makes it clear who was missing from John Trumbull’s famous painting of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
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October 6, 2022
But this new Broadway mounting (which originated last summer at American Repertory Theatre and will embark on a national tour next spring) wants to have it both ways — they’re simultaneously hoping we notice how progressive it’s trying to be, but also not really, while emphasizing the wrong things along the way. The result, while enjoyable, shows a fundamental lack of trust and understanding in material that they would see already does the work for them, if they just stopped to listen.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 6, 2022
Short of lightning-fast rap battles, if anything can make a group of dead white men talking interesting, it’s the knowledge that we’re really watching a lively, fresh generation of actors making their names known and their voices heard.
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October 6, 2022
Stone’s book is also, as evidenced by the frustrating new revival of the show that opened Thursday night on Broadway, absolutely ironclad — and able to stand up to pointless, auteurist, burdensome, woke concepts like the one on display at the American Airlines Theatre.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 6, 2022
In short, then, you have a revival that wants both to revive the material and blow it up, even though “1776″ hardly was a crude work of musical triumphalism. Sure, “1776″ is problematic, not unlike most cultural entities from 1969, but if that it was it wanted to foreground, the production needed to have better sense of the irony of bringing it back to our attention.
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