The uprisings fundamentally changed Paulus’s plans for 1776. The company dug more deeply into readings that included the 1619 Project and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning. Paulus made the show’s choreographer, Jeffrey Page, her co-director. Together, they made transformative choices, embracing a Brechtian approach that eschewed illusionistic details, including the famous closing fade to the painting of the signers. When it opened, at long last, this 1776 would take place firmly in the now.
I have thought a lot, in the context of this earnest, imperfect musical, about the differences between our moment and 1969, year of wounds, when the dream of the ’60s curdled into Manson and Altamont. When Americans, still reeling from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, lurched through the Tet Offensive that escalated their war abroad, and the bombings and protests that brought the war home, as the Weathermen had urged. I comfort myself with the claim—mostly true—that the late ’60s and early ’70s were more perilous, more violent, more fractured than our angrily Roaring ’20s.
Yet we have become, far more than our parents and grandparents, a people as morally confident as we are polarized. On the right, this conviction often expresses as uncritical worship for the founding era—history contorted to cudgel a decadent cultural left. On the left, moral certainty begets condescension to the generations who lived before us, as to those who voted against us. These are but subvariants of the same debilitating virus. As the historian Robert Tracy McKenzie asks in his fascinating recent book, We the Fallen People: “Is part of the problem of American democracy that we Americans think too highly of ourselves?”
Where the sensibility that defined 1969’s 1776 was Franklin’s pragmatic unionism, the stance that dominates in the Paulus-Page revival is Adams’s unyielding righteousness, a tragic flaw turned core virtue. As in 1969, there are no gods onstage. But now there are plenty of monsters, especially South Carolina’s Edward Rutledge, played by Sara Porkalob as a sneering Simon Legree. As Porkalob leads the cast in “Molasses to Rum”—the number’s length now expanded by 50 percent—curtains part to reveal, behind the proscenium arch, stacks of rum barrels looming over Independence Hall. By the end, the barrels stand 10 or 12 high, spanning the crossover space, stretching to the rafters—foul skyscrapers dwarfing Independence Hall. The delegates’ signatures are projected onto the barrels, as if showcasing the tentacular reach of slavery through every one of the newly United States.
In 1969’s 1776, moral philosophy was destiny. Once uttered, “these truths,” however incomplete, lit a beacon for the future. For the world.
In 2022’s 1776, political economy calls the shots. Instead of a promissory note for human equality, the Framers sign a deal with the devil. The stain of slavery upon a land of liberty, which enslaved people bravely decried in petitions in the 1770s, and which Edwards and Stone dramatized in 1969, becomes, in 2022, the sum and substance of American history.