Birth of a Jape

In a recent New Yorker cartoon, a scrofulous bum is shuffling past a Broadway theater at intermission time. With smug insouciance, he addresses a passing query to the patrons under the marquee: "How about it, folks? Getting your eleven dollars and ninety cents' worth?" Top ticket prices are $15 for 1776, and to answer the bum's question, it is a bearable $3 show.

For one-fifth of one's money's worth, one gets a stereotypical version of the key signers of the Declaration of Independence, together with the sometimes abrasive, sometimes soporific deliberations of the Second Continental Congress. History painted, as it were, by a sidewalk sketch artist, must rely on calcified profiles rather than searching character penetration. The Peter Stone book depends on the audience to expect the expected, and to bring along its own worn coloring crayons to the roles.

Moldy Chestnuts. What is expected of John Adams, intellectual Brahmin of Boston? Adams (William Daniels) must be thin lipped, disdainful, fanatical, puritanical, rapier tongued, and cordially disliked for rubbing his lazy-brained colleagues the wrong way with his indefatigable insistence on freedom. The audience may color him blueblood and relish his thwarted Harvardian desire to correct Jefferson's English from "inalienable" to "unalienable." And how is Ben Franklin (Howard Da Silva) portrayed? Foxy good sense, a plaguy gout, a dash of smarmy lechery and a few jokes about electricity--that is all one needs for Franklin. And that is precisely what one gets. As for Thomas Jefferson (Ken Howard), he pines for his bride. Only her presence permits him to wield the quill of independence. For Jefferson to submit to certain hoary newlywed jokes may have seemed essential for a show as commerce oriented as 1776, but it is scarcely a necessity for the real Thomas Jefferson, a writer by gift and a patriot by vocation.

To believe for a single moment that one will be spared those moldy chestnuts that New York play-scripters toss at Philadelphia is to guess wrong. Sample torpid humor: "At the stage when most men prosper, I live in Philadelphia on three dollars a day." The musical score might have led Van Gogh to dispose of his remaining ear, and a brigade of crippled pigeons could have performed better dance numbers. There is a degradation of intellect, taste and dignity about the entire musical. The men involved were the architects of a great republic, men of passion, probity and reason. Touched with some impalpable and mysterious inspiration, they proved to be the golden brood of 18th century Enlightenment. To the nation, which was a gleam of courage in their fertile imagination, they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. On Broadway, 1776 brings the heroic, tempestuous birth of a people and a polity down to a feeble vaudevillian jape.

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