‘1776’ Review: Adams & Eves
Hats off to the sparkling ensemble of a '1776' revival that pinpoints the foresight and blind spots of the Founding Fathers.
Oh, what a momentous time in this nation’s history to contemplate what on earth the founding fathers were thinking when they envisioned these United States of America.
Last year’s radical Broadway revival of Tony-winner 1776 (★★★☆☆), directed by Jeffrey L. Morgan and Diane Paulus, also thrust front-and-center the question of whom the founders were thinking, by presenting an entire cast of performers who identify as female, trans, or nonbinary, many of them people of color, portraying the white men who convened to create a country.
Much of the Broadway cast continues in the national touring production, currently at the Kennedy Center, though they’re almost all trying on different roles.
For anyone missing the point that this won’t be your mama’s Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, or Hancock, the cast, en masse, make a show at the start of stepping into the coats, stockings, and stiff, buckled court shoes of the “framers of independence.”
That framework, we know, didn’t include independence for every person in America, and it would be hard to forget that even with traditional casting — perhaps even moreso in this day and age.
But Morgan and Paulus’ primary update poignantly serves to remind that the sage Revolutionaries depicted in Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s 1969 musical-comedy held a very narrow view of what constituted an American, and, nearly 250 years later, far less wise men still think it’s for them to debate who is and isn’t a person worthy of nationhood.
So it’s with a powerful sense of dignity that the members of this diverse ensemble don those coats and shoes, and essay the nation’s origin story, built around John Adams (Gisela Adisa) trying to convince the delegates of the Second Continental Congress to vote on a resolution for independence.
From the get-go, Adams’ fellow delegates are screaming, “John, sit down!” He’s obnoxious and disliked, he’s told on several occasions, though those aren’t exactly the leading traits of Adisa’s performance in the part.
Her Adams is passionate — about building a nation, and loving his wife, Abigail (portrayed opening night by Brooke Simpson, standing in for Tieisha Thomas) — and just energetic enough to keep the narrative ball moving. The proceedings perk up more when momentum is handed to star players like Shawna Hamic, reviving her bravura Broadway turn as delegate Richard Henry Lee of Virginia.
Hamic has a grand old time with Lee’s hilariously self-referencing “The Lees of Old Virginia,” accompanied by Liz Mikel’s dotty and delightful Ben Franklin, ever reliable for a laugh and for Franklin’s authoritative sway over members of this august body.
Franklin and Adams don’t hold sway over the all-but-hissing villains of the piece: Joanna Glushak’s prim, pantherish royalist, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, and Kassandra Haddock’s icy, smooth-talking South Carolina slaveholder, Edward Rutledge. The syrup drips a little too thickly from Rutledge’s tongue, while Glushak sharpens Dickinson’s delivery to a fine, ruthless edge.
In one of the few scenes where debate and rancor are quieted to consider the losses a young nation has already faced, Candice Marie Woods (standing in on opening night for Simpson as the Courier) puts over a beautiful “Momma, Look Sharp,” a highlight of Edwards’ pithy, tuneful score, and another poignant reminder that all kinds of people have died fighting for the United States of America.
Again, who or what is included in that concept remains an open question to many modern-day Dickinsons, politicians, and Justices of the Supreme Court. The directors address that question in contemporary terms with a video montage projected onto Scott Pask’s humdrum set during “The Egg,” the song in which Franklin leads the company to cheer the “chirp, chirp, chirp” of a newly hatched nation.
Clipping through a brief, uplifting history of progress made in the United States doesn’t capture the struggle to “birth a nation” with nearly the succinct impact of the show’s final gesture, when the cast sheds their coats and characters and proudly faces the audience again as their true selves.
1776 runs through July 16 in the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. Tickets are $45 to $155. Call 202-467-4600, or visit www.kennedy-center.org.
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