1776 (Broadway)

Review of 1776 on Broadway.

I had been interested in this show for awhile before I ended up buying my ticket. This was before all of the drama came out, before the negative reviews began to flood in.

The primarily reason I was interested was because it was a cast consisting of all women and non-binary individuals portraying America’s founding fathers. There’s a lot of ripe potential in that in the vein of Hamilton, and I wanted to see if the casting added a lot more to the show—which I was unfamiliar with before buying this ticket.

So I bought the ticket. I had a Hiptix membership with Roundabout, which is completely free if you’re under the age of thirty to be enrolled in. Basically, you can get $30 tickets for any of Roundabout’s shows, and they are really good seats.

They gave me Row L slightly off to the left, three seats over from the leftmost aisle, and I thought that the view was perfect. It was a nice orchestra seat and the only complaint was that the leftmost back part of the stage was cut off, but nothing really happens there anyways. I really wanted to cancel this ticket because I didn’t think I’d love the show, and I ended up being right about that feeling.

This adaptation of 1776 features an all-female and non-binary cast.

If you’re not a fan of American history or of the original movie or musical, this show will not be for you. The entire premise of the show is that the focus is on John Adams and his fight to get the Declaration of Independence signed by the Continental Congress.

A common motif throughout the show repeated is that no one likes Adams and they all think he is very obnoxious. The original John Adams, who starred in the show originally, had left by the time I saw it, so I saw the new one before the show ultimately closes. Besides that, it was the entire cast for the Sunday matinee.

Essentially, Adams is trying to get the colonies to declare Independence and is met with a lot of resistance. He gets allies with several key figures, including Benjamin Franklin, but one of the biggest opposers is the delegate from Pennsylvania.

They eventually get to vote on the bill, with occasional dispatches from George Washington breaking up the flow, and Jefferson ends up writing the Declaration after they call for his wife. The other delegates come around, leading to the ousting of the Pennsylvania delegate who decides he will fight with the British in the war.

The show begins with the women stepping into the roles of the founding fathers, making this seem like a play within a play in my analytical eye.

The stage is literally split into thirds and divided by a curtain, which they project words, images, and scenes onto. Dates are on the screen, as well as a random montage of American history that ends with Obama. And that ends up tying into my major problems with the show: it tries way too hard. I can see how the casting could really impact the show’s lens, but I don’t see how it ends up serving a larger, more meaningful purpose.

The scenes where this really starts to come out are, for example, “He Plays the Violin.” The woman who plays Jefferson’s wife was formerly in The Phantom of the Opera, so that scene was musically gorgeous.

The innuendos land differently because of it, too. But where it really doesn’t work is from “Molasses to Rum” onwards. Porkalob gives one of the best performances in the show here, in my humble opinion, as she runs around the stage and belts out this horrific number about why we need slavery.

In this scene, though, they make the Black actors portray slaves at an auction as the white cast members act out being the buyers and onlookers. The nonwhite remaining cast members kind of exist in this limbo throughout the scene.

I see why they wanted to do this. It makes people uncomfortable and is a really harsh reality check about American history. But it just doesn’t work in a show that glorifies the Founding Fathers. They did not like Native people, and some, like Jefferson, really did own slaves.

A lot of them did not genuinely believe in access to equal rights for everyone, and while the show might make it seem like they did and only the South didn’t want that, it was not the truth. Porkalob’s character’s statements ring true because the North did participate in slavery and they were on a bit of a high horse acting like they had high morality here.

In addition to this, the staging and blocking were too much for me. They did not need to have almost every single character on stage for a vast majority of the scenes.

Now, I will say that the performances and acting were very good in this show. I will not deny that everyone did a great job in the role they were placed into. But good acting cannot save a show from the technical elements, and the blocking was simply much too distracting at times. I don’t need random characters at the front of the stage pretending to have a conversation when they might not even need to be there. I understand why it was done at certain times, but then it came across as too much too often.

Overall Thoughts

Good performances, but I genuinely did not care about this show leaving it. I kind of wished I saw something different while I was up in New York, but I had bought this ticket way in advance. I am excited for some of these actors’ careers, including Porkalob, regardless of the controversies that have been stirred up during this production.

My row was empty by the end of intermission because quite a few people just left and never came back, which is a sign to me that they did not like what they were watching. Give it a chance if you’re vaguely interested, but my suggestion is to not spend too much money on it,