5/8/2023 0 Comments 1776 the bookStudies classes at Penn State University back in the day, and I found that some of my students were quite put off to see future signers of the Declaration of Independence talking so frankly about sex, drunkenness, and bathroom functions but anyone who has read 18th-century American writers, including Benjamin Franklin, knows that Stone and Edwards are being true to the often earthy realities of American life in that time. I showed the film version of 1776 in a couple of U.S. Stone and Edwards create a colonial Philadelphia populated with characters who are quarrelsome, bawdy, and fun-loving - in short, they are about as far as one can get from the dignified monumental statuary that one sees throughout the area around the Independence National Historical Park in contemporary Philadelphia. But Stone's dialogue is just as trenchant when one is reading the book for the musical the authors effectively dramatize the Second Continental Congress's 1776 deliberations upon the subject of an American Declaration of Independence from Great Britain. Reading the play, one must “re-play” the music in one’s own mind. Watching the play on stage – as, for example, when it was staged at historic Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., in 2012 – or seeing the Peter Hunt film from 1972 means that one gets to enjoy Edwards’s evocative music. 1776, the Peter Stone/Sherman Edwards musical play from 1969, is quite different when you read it rather than viewing it.
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