How much can counterintuitive casting change the meaning of a widely known work? Over the summer I watched Danai Gurira creditably play the title role of “Richard III” in Central Park, but it surely looked as if it would me that having a non-disabled Black woman in that iconic lead role neither damaged nor especially illuminated the play’s inner workings. Then again, by casting a Black family because the downwardly mobile Lomans, Broadway’s recent “Death of a Salesman” is mining bruising insights in regards to the American Dream that seemingly lay buried in Arthur Miller’s classic play all along.
Within the case of the brand new Broadway staging of “1776,” nonetheless, it just isn’t primarily the work itself—an above-average, occasionally good 1969 musical in regards to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, by Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone—that’s challenged or reframed by its forged of girls and nonbinary folks, most of them people of color. It’s the work’s subject, the country’s founding by a couple of dozen privileged white men, that is supposed to be held as much as a recent light by this casting selection.
While Lin-Manuel Miranda’s popular Founding Fathers remix was built for performers of color, “1776” has been retrofitted onto this troupe of talented women.
Within the age of “Hamilton,” though, it’s hardly radical to be reminded that these are a few of the Americans who were excluded from the rooms where it happened. And whereas Lin-Manuel Miranda’s popular Founding Fathers remix was explicitly built for performers of color, “1776” has been retrofitted onto this troupe of talented women. Co-directors Diane Paulus and Jeffrey L. Page emphasize the seeming incongruity by having the 22-member forged come out in contemporary clothes, then step into the familiar 18th-century tailcoats and buckle shoes (though, as in “Hamilton,” they keep their Twenty first-century hairstyles and, on this case, jewelry).
What follows works remarkably well, up to some extent, primarily since the forged is jam-packed with a wide selection of first-rate performers. No, we never quite “forget” they’re women playing men, but to the extent the show succeeds, it does so more on old-fashioned musical theater terms than as a meta-commentary on the nation’s birth.
The plot follows the stubborn efforts of John Adams (Crystal Lucas-Perry), by his own account “obnoxious and disliked,” to bring the matter of the colonies’ independence from Britain to a vote of the Continental Congress during a sweltering summer in Philadelphia, at the same time as George Washington’s troops are mostly unsuccessfully engaging the British in Recent York and Recent Jersey. Adams is opposed not only by Northern loyalists to the crown but by representatives of most of the Southern colonies, who’re wary of a recent American government that may limit their very own sovereignty, particularly within the matter of slavery.
To the extent the show succeeds, it does so more on old-fashioned musical theater terms than as a meta-commentary on the nation’s birth.
But Adams gains the invaluable alliance of the doddering-like-a-fox Ben Franklin (Patrena Murray) and the sly, gentlemanly rhetorician Thomas Jefferson (Elizabeth A. Davis). It is that this unlikely trio that makes the case for independence via the document many Americans now consider as holy writ, second only to, and even rating above, the U.S. Structure.
In fact, one in every of the points of “1776” is to flippantly demythologize these figures and reveal that they were neither more nor lower than human, and that the final result of their irritable wranglings and factional disputes was contingent, not predetermined. “What’s going to posterity think we were, demigods?” Franklin says with painfully sharp irony at one point. This is available in an important scene during which Jefferson is strong-armed into removing anti-slavery language from the Declaration by a rival Southern delegation—one other wince-worthy irony, given Jefferson’s often enthusiastic embrace of that “peculiar institution.”
Paulus and Page’s production pushes this self-critical strain a couple of steps further than the unique. They’ve Jefferson’s enslaved Black butler appear at his side in a couple of key scenes, they usually turn “Molasses to Rum,” a scathing jeremiad in regards to the complicity of all of the early colonies, not only the Southern ones, within the slave economy, right into a writhing phantasmagoria of the Middle Passage and the auction block. These are delicate, equivocal moments, as they consciously break the show’s casting illusion to have many of the forged’s Black actors represent Black slaves reasonably than white statesmen.
Occupying a fair more pointedly ambiguous space is the show’s rendering of the wrenching anti-war anthem “Momma, Look Sharp,” during which the race of two Black actors—Salome B. Smith as a plaintive young recruit, and Liz Mikel within the role of a lamenting mother—not so implicitly reminds us of the disproportionate toll of violence on African Americans throughout U.S. history, right up to the current.
We could also be too spoiled by the cupboard rap battles of “Hamilton” to not squirm a bit in these discursive passages.
As these many examples may suggest, the race of the actors on this recent production figures rather more heavily than their gender within the ostensible recontextualizing of “1776.” It’s because, while Edwards and Stone’s original script is unflinching in regards to the founders’ exclusion of Black people from full citizenship, it has nothing to say in regards to the similar erasure of girls. Quite the opposite, the 2 female characters who briefly appear are defined entirely by their warm, even ardent relationships with their husbands. Though Abigail Adams (played sweetly by Allyson Kaye Daniel) appears as John’s equal in merit and intelligence, and at one point quotes her famous “remember the women” letter (“Don’t put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men can be tyrants in the event that they could”), she is otherwise the image of domestic competence and contentment.
Meanwhile, in one in every of the show’s oddest, giddiest musical numbers, Martha Jefferson (Eryn LeCroy) extols her husband’s facility with the violin in a beautiful, lilting waltz, performing it so ecstatically that it becomes clear she just isn’t really referring to his musical instrument.
Elsewhere Edwards’s rating is affecting and sometimes witty, if seldom rousing, and should be most notable for its relative scarcity. Long scenes of deliberation and debate go by with nary a sung note, and though these are as crisply staged and performed as they’re smartly written, we could also be too spoiled by the cupboard rap battles of “Hamilton” to not squirm a bit in these discursive passages.
What, finally, does the project of recasting these roles with mostly women of color say about our nation’s founding or the principles it set forth? It definitely doesn’t absolve these historical characters of the sins of exclusion and omission they perpetuated. Does it inject a retroactive dose of alternate-universe inclusion into their ideals of equality and liberty, as incompletely realized as they were of their time? Which may describe a little bit of the tricky, disarming alchemy of “Hamilton” as well.
Ultimately, though, the message of this recent “1776” is each subtler and simpler: that girls can literally fill any role, and are long gone due the possibility to accomplish that, whether play-acting our nation’s founding or leading it for real.
