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.
1776 — Photo: Joan Marcus
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.
You've heard of Chekhov's Gun. Now consider "Chekhov's Bees." If a backyard apiary of bees is introduced at the beginning of the movie, the bees will be whipped into a frenzy by the film's end, terrorizing some poor character.
Bugonia, the fiendishly funny new nightmare from Greek filmmaker/provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, The Lobster), bears out this theory. The bees belong to our troubled hero, Teddy Gatz (a shaggy-bearded, greasy-haired Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy theorist and amateur beekeeper who lives in an old house with his young, neurodivergent cousin, Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis). Teddy spends his days working a menial warehouse job and his nights traveling down YouTube rabbit holes and obsessively developing theories involving Andromedan aliens who intend to destroy humanity.
About halfway through Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach directs a love scene. I don't mean that there is a sex scene (those rarely appear in Baumbach's cinematic universe, except the mortifyingly awkward kind). I mean that Baumbach himself appears onscreen, in a wink-nod cameo, as a fictitious filmmaker, choreographing an intimate scene between our hero, Jay Kelly (played in flashback by Charlie Rowe), and an actress playing his wife (Eve Hewson), who becomes his real-life paramour, though not real real-life, but -- ah, who's to say what's real anyway?
Baumbach has never been the sort of director to place himself onscreen, but the indulgence fits with a certain metatextual thread in Jay Kelly, a wry Hollywood satire and wistful character study infused with the director's signature familial discord. Here is a film about making sense of your life when, as Jay puts it, "all my memories are movies"; a film about sifting through the thin thread that separates public persona and private identity. How much of your life is real when millions of people know and adore you for playing someone else? And what about the real family you neglected to pursue those celluloid dreams -- is it too late to make amends?
Given how often today's news outlets distort the truth or report outright lies, it's almost comical that E.L. Doctorow's 1975 novel Ragtime was once dismissed by The New Yorker's editor William Shawn. Because Doctorow's tale, set in the early twentieth century, wove real historical figures into fictional lives, Shawn refused to publish a full-length review, calling the book "immoral."
Now, the musical adaptation returns with forceful, spectacular splendor at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre. And this second revival of the beloved story arrives on Broadway at just the right time.
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