‘1776’ Review: A Revolutionary Take On An Old Warhorse
06.06.2022 - 14:23
/ variety.com
Bob Verini When the Tony-winning musical “1776” debuted on Broadway in 1969, it celebrated America’s ideals on the eve of its Bicentennial. Half a century later, a radical makeover brings critique front and center, while treating those ideals as a chimera rather than a promise fulfilled.
The production’s pre-Broadway tryout at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., holds this truth to be self-evident: that the Declaration of Independence’s promises of freedom and justice were mere words, compromised and betrayed from the very moment of ratification.Director Diane Paulus is no stranger to re-envisioning musical classics, having given new life to “Hair” and brought out the lessons in a circus-themed “Pippin.” Now she and choreographer/co-director Jeffrey L. Page go all-in on a political perspective, infusing librettist Peter Stone’s story of the Continental Congress with 20/20 hindsight.
Never are we allowed to forget that the founders were self-interested fathers, heedless of women as thinking citizens and ready to consign people of color to history’s ashbin. A point of view is established right away, in Brechtian strokes.
Against a front cloth projection of John Trumbull’s famous July 4 painting – which ended Peter Hunt’s original production – in saunters Crystal Lucas-Perry in white top and black slacks, impressive black braids down her back. She looks up skeptically at the historical fellows, then at us, and embarks on John Adams’ opening speech about Congress defined as “three or more useless men,” to knowing laughter.
Before you can say “Sit Down, John,” an entire company of multiracial, multiethnic performers identifying as female, trans and non-binary is revealed. In slow motion and eerily front-lit, they
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