Katie Buenneke – Theater Digest.
I would not, normally, choose to be watching the musical 1776. Just thinking about it brings back memories of watching the movie in my US history class, junior year of high school, with Abigail Adams wistfully singing about saltpeter to Mr. Feeny. It did not work for me then, when American patriotism only felt poisonous in relation to the Iraq war, and red white and blue evoked Obama’s “Hope” campaign posters rather than MAGA caps and an insurrection at the Capital, but I suppose this is as close at it will come to working for me now. The cast is exceedingly strong across the board, especially Liz Mikel as Benjamin Franklin, and Brooke Simpson as the courier. Read more…
Socks Whitmore – Stage Raw
In this production of 1776, however, Page and Paulus tactfully call attention to the distasteful through the lens of humor and a broader cultural awareness. The show’s casting is its greatest asset; reimagined through a collective of femmes and thems, the plethora of sexual jokes and toxicly masculine moments are made pointedly satirical and queer, and the normally bass-y sounds of an anachronistic male ensemble are replaced with a brighter, contemporary-feeling timbre. The revisioning of onstage representation also doesn’t stop at gender; this 1776 tour features a variety of body sizes rarely found in Broadway spaces, as well as three or four different cane-using characters in a cast of around 20. The power of populating a male-dominated historical show with femme-perceived performers is an interesting gender phenomenon, and seeing White colonists like John and Abigail Adams reimagined as Black sapphic women is especially delicious. Read more…