![]() ![]() Edwards’s score, top-tier to begin with, sounds fresh when transposed into new keys and belted in a female register. ( Playbill readers will notice that two cast members are dating each other.)Ĭasting aside, Page and Paulus have given us a surprisingly straightforward interpretation of 1776, unexpectedly proving that it’s still a viable property in a post- Hamilton world. But the shared energy and chemistry transcend any individual performance, and under the direction of Page and Paulus, everyone onstage seems to be having the time of their life. My favorites - it’s the kind of show that encourages you to pick favorites - were Shawna Hamic, bombastic as Richard Henry Lee, Brooke Simpson, sparkly and adorable as Roger Sherman, and Patrena Murray, whose wry, understated performance as Benjamin Franklin feels definitive. Led by the charismatic Crystal Lucas-Perry as John Adams, the ensemble cast is a thrilling mix of Broadway veterans (including Carolee Carmello, resplendent in villain mode as John Dickinson) and newcomers. The talent level is so high that the casting feels less conceptual and more incidental. Though I spent the opening number puzzling over what the nontraditional casting was doing for the show - what statement it was making, how literally we were meant to interpret it, whether it was working too hard against the text - I soon ceased to notice it at all. It’s important to keep an open mind, but a lot of minds will have to be pried open like a stubborn pistachio.Īnd yet, if you can pry … well, I’ll be damned. There are no men in the cast, which, as the press release puts it, “includes multiple representations of race, ethnicity, and gender they identify as female, transgender and nonbinary.” (Though there are no trans women among them.) This Lex post of a cast opens the show by stepping silently into the Founding Fathers’ buckled shoes while staring defiantly into the audience. Just as “sexy Oklahoma!” became shorthand for Daniel Fish’s 2019 Rodgers and Hammerstein reimagining, this production (now running at the American Airlines Theatre) is likely to be glossed as “woke 1776.” The preshow announcement to turn off your phone is preceded by a land acknowledgment. You’ll probably side-eye harder the more you learn about the Roundabout Theatre Company’s new revival, co-directed by Jeffrey L. Whether you’re a Hamilton fan, a Hamilton skeptic, or a Hamilton agnostic burned out on the whole American experiment, you’d be forgiven for side-eyeing a less revolutionary Revolution musical. For another, Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s musical dramatization of the creation of the Declaration of Independence, acclaimed when it premiered in 1969, is now doomed to languish in the shadow of its cooler kid sister Hamilton. ![]() For one thing, read the room: Patriotic pride is at an all-time low around these parts. In 2022, a revival of 1776 is an almost perversely hard sell. Davis, Patrena Murray, and Crystal Lucas-Perry in 1776.
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