1776
Reviewed by Socks Whitmore
Ahmanson Theatre
Through May 7, 2023
Just six months after Daniel Fish’s “sexy Oklahoma!” departed the Ahmanson Theatre, a new bold revival has taken up residence on Center Theatre Group’s main stage. The North American tour of 1776, a 1969 Broadway musical by Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone, directed by Jeffrey L. Page and Diane Paulus — notably featuring a cast entirely comprised of female, transgender, and gender non-conforming actors in the roles of the famous Founding Fathers.
The patriotic romp retells the birth of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence, interspersing the misadventures of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson with musical numbers and raunchy punchlines. Adams, pointedly described as “obnoxious and disliked,” spearheads mighty efforts both within and beyond the chambers of the Second Continental Congress for the 13 colonies to officially declare their independence from Britain. Comparisons to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton would not be unwarranted; Miranda has publicly cited 1776 as a predecessor that “paved the way” for his famous hip-hop musical. The current revival also shares Hamilton’s expansive approach to casting historical roles while reclaiming power from the cisheteronormative, white, able-bodied systems that have long dominated history.
There’s a reason why Hamilton is a household name and 1776 is not; to put it bluntly, the show’s book and score are the clumsily crafted, gratuitously sexist, self-indulgent creations of cisgender white men trying to be interesting. The topic of slavery and racial oppression is shoehorned into the second act via “Molasses to Rum,” a villainous number that drags on and edits history for the sake of dramaturgical convenience. Songs like “He Plays the Violin” and “Momma Look Sharp” are awkwardly inserted without real purpose, and generally the music exhibits little understanding of dramatic structure. The frequent bursts of Congressional infighting lead to an excess of chaos without high caliber music to ground them. The show is reported to hold the record for stretch of time without a song in any musical, a testament to the overly sparse nature of the score — one wonders if 1776 would have made more sense as a play, but required musical interjections to prevent the lengthy political discussions from growing stale.
In this production of 1776, however, Page and Paulus tactfully call attention to the distasteful through the lens of humor and a broader cultural awareness. The show’s casting is its greatest asset; reimagined through a collective of femmes and thems, the plethora of sexual jokes and toxicly masculine moments are made pointedly satirical and queer, and the normally bass-y sounds of an anachronistic male ensemble are replaced with a brighter, contemporary-feeling timbre. The revisioning of onstage representation also doesn’t stop at gender; this 1776 tour features a variety of body sizes rarely found in Broadway spaces, as well as three or four different cane-using characters in a cast of around 20. The power of populating a male-dominated historical show with femme-perceived performers is an interesting gender phenomenon, and seeing White colonists like John and Abigail Adams reimagined as Black sapphic women is especially delicious. After watching this show, audiences may find themselves more able to decouple gender identity from presentation, which is a pertinent reframing in the current era of civil unrest surrounding the transgender community in America. It might also be noted that the show lacks transfeminine representation, decidedly stilting its approach to gender expansiveness.
The choreography and its use of poses is striking given the ensemble’s considerable size, with an especially interesting use of slow motion and auditory chaos to stage transitions fast-forwarding through time. The colorful petticoats from costume designer Emilio Sosa are a fresh, visually grabbing take on period fashion. The oddly low-cut rolling screens that frame much of the action create a smaller sense of space than typical of a musical at the Ahmanson, but they still serve effectively enough as displays for a variety of video projections. This includes a rapid-fire montage of footage from contemporary social movements during the triumphant number, “The Egg,” underscoring the parallels across 250 years of American political events and the innate correlation between the first fight for independence and the unending battle for equity and justice.
Although the source material leaves something to be desired, this adaptation is 1776 at its absolute best. One hopes that the continued success of innovative revivals opens the doors for ever more invigorating theater.
Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles; Tues-Fri at 8:00 pm; Sat at 2:00 pm & 8:00 pm; Sun at 1:00 pm & 6:30 pm. https://www.centertheatregroup.org/tickets/ahmanson-theatre/2022/1776/ Running time: 2 hr 45 min with one intermission
