Actor Clifford David with cast members in the 1969 Broadway production of 1776 (Photo by Martha Swope © Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)

For the Fourth of July holiday and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we’re pleased to present this essay by Laurence Maslon, editor of LOA’s two-volume American Musicals edition and Kaufman & Co.: Broadway Comedies, about 1776, the hit 1969 musical that brought the Founders to life on stage, nearly fifty years before Hamilton.

by Laurence Maslon

In his new book The Living Declaration, historian Ted Widmer writes about the cultural vitality of the Declaration of Independence, noting how its timeless themes and myriad interpretations “speak to us, and they talk to each other as well, in a conversation that will never end.” On March 16, 1969, at the 46th Street Theater, a Broadway musical opened that transformed the Declaration into a living entity, the framers talking to each other, and speaking—and singing—to an audience from the stage.

1776 is one of the great outliers in American theater history. Surely it was first musical in which nearly every American knew the characters, but hardly anyone—even in show business—knew the creative team behind it. The musical, dramatizing the events of the enervatingly hot summer of 1776, when the Second Continental Congress convened in “foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy” Philadelphia, was the brainchild of pop songwriter Sherman Edwards. “I wanted to show these men [John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, et al.] at their outermost limits,” he told The New York Times. “[What] they came up with was never perfect. But it was as good as they could make it at the time.”

Promotional poster for 1776 (Wikimedia Commons)

The idea of Broadway characters mincing about to minuet music in wigs and jabots and breeches had never been particularly compelling. Rodgers and Hart had a minor hit with a Revolutionary War romance, Dearest Enemy, back in 1925 and Robert Preston starred in Ben Franklin in Paris in 1964; the production didn’t supply much electricity and closed quickly.

Luckily for Edwards, his outlandish project found an admirer in producer Stuart Ostrow, a young, adventuresome Broadway impresario, who brought in Peter Stone, an Academy Award–winning screenwriter, to write the book to Edwards’s score. Stone initially thought the whole enterprise was preposterous, but from the moment he heard Edwards play the opening number, “You knew immediately that John Adams and the others were not going to be treated as gods, or cardboard characters; it wasn’t reverential.”

American Musicals 1950–1969

The ranks of the Continental Congress were filled with some of New York’s best-regarded character actors. William Daniels was given the role of a lifetime as the “obnoxious and disliked” firebrand John Adams. In a delicious irony, Howard da Silva, who had started with the Group Theater in the 1930s and had been blacklisted in the 1950s for his left-wing politics, was cast as Benjamin Franklin (imagine Jane Fonda playing Eleanor Roosevelt and you’ll get an idea of how resonant this casting was in the late 1960s).

When 1776 opened in the spring of 1969, it took a weary and jaded city by storm. The British-born critic for The New York Times, Clive Barnes, claimed that the show made “even an Englishman’s heart beat faster.” The production was nominated for five Tony Awards and won three, including Best Musical (oddly, there were no awards that season for Best Book or Best Score; the musical surely would have won at least one).

The musical was complex and broad enough to provide something for everyone, whether they were patriots or anarchists, conservatives or liberals, or simply human beings with some historical curiosity and political consciousness.

1776 debuted at a pivotal time in American history. Richard Nixon had just been elected and the number of American troops in Vietnam had rapidly risen to more than half a million. Very much like the revisionist film Patton, released a year later, the musical was complex and broad enough to provide something for everyone, whether they were patriots or anarchists, conservatives or liberals, or simply human beings with some historical curiosity and political consciousness—exactly as Edwards had originally conceived it.

That evenhandedness was to come in handy nearly a year into the show’s run, when the Nixon administration asked the cast to come to Washington and perform for an invited audience of two hundred on a quickly mocked-up stage in the East Room (when there still was an East Room).

President Richard Nixon with the cast of 1776 after the 1971 White House performance in the East Room (Public Domain)

William Safire, then working for Nixon as a speechwriter, tried to get Ostrow to cut the antiwar song “Momma, Look Sharp” for fear of offending the president, but the producer said he would only bring 1776 to the White House if it were performed in its entirety. On Washington’s Birthday, 1970, it became the first musical to earn that distinction, and received a rapturous response from the Nixons and their mostly Republican guests. While the rest of the cast went back to New York that night, Howard da Silva stayed in Washington at a hotel across the street from the White House. The next morning, he awoke to the sounds of an antiwar demonstration organizing outside; da Silva got dressed and joined the rally.

A film version of 1776 was by no means guaranteed. In the early 1970s, Hollywood was reeling from some colossal failures in the musical genre, but studio giant Jack L. Warner bought the rights and, surprisingly, hired nearly all the original stage actors for the film.

Poster for the 1972 film version of 1776 (Wikimedia Commons)

Warner, a good friend of Richard Nixon’s, had expressed reservations about the song “Cool, Cool, Considerate Men,” which offers a critical portrayal of some southern congressmen and their loyalist motives. He feared the song was potentially offensive to the president and his conservative supporters (the cast had noticed a marked chill in the air during its rendition at the White House). Without telling the film’s director, Warner cut the number from the initial 1972 release, along with another ten minutes or so of dialogue. Happily, the 2015 Blu-ray release restored these cuts; although the technical quality of the scenes varies, this is the version that Turner Classic Movies now broadcasts on the Fourth of July.

More than most musicals, 1776 seems to polarize audiences. It has its, um, loyalists, including me (it was the first Broadway show I ever saw, at the age of nine—not in 1776, but in 1970) as well as battalions of fifth-grade social studies teachers. The text was always destined to be one of the sixteen musicals included in LOA’s American Musicals volumes, which I edited.

It also has its detractors. In a review of the LOA anthology for the Wall Street Journal in 2014, Robert Gottlieb wrote, “Yes, it’s cleverly structured and pumped for suspense, but the tone of much of [1776] is so cute, cute, cute that it reduces the birth of the United States to a sit-com with powdered wigs.”

Pauline Kael, then the reigning doyenne of film criticism at The New Yorker, savaged the movie version from top to bottom: “Can this show really please multitudes of Americans? Have we lost the capacity for knowing when we’re insulted?”

Widmer, for his part, relegates the musical to a passing reference in The Living Declaration; David McCullough, on the other hand, sent the first draft of his massive 2001 biography of John Adams to actor William Daniels for his feedback.

Congress Voting Independence by Robert Edge Pine, a key visual reference for 1776 (Public Domain)

Fortunately for longtime fans and newcomers alike, 1776 keeps rolling along. Its Independence Day TV showings have become a rite for many, and during this semiquincentennial year, there have been a dozen professional productions and over 160 community or school productions nationwide.

According to Widmer’s book, in his later years John Adams dismissed the Declaration itself “as ‘a Theatrical Show’ and a ‘Stage Effect’ of some fleeting interest, but far less important than the actual vote for independence.” Ironically, the “theatrical show” of the signing of the Declaration of Independence remains a critical and enduring character study of our flawed Founders and their political passions; that the “stage effect” of 1776 still engages audiences more than half a century after its Broadway debut is self-evident.

Laurence Maslon is an arts professor at New York University. He edited Library of America’s two-volume American Musicals edition. Stone and Edwards’s foreword to the script of 1776, in which they describe their work on the text in compelling detail, is reproduced in the Notes section of Volume Two.