Boston Lyric Opera Drops Donizetti in the American Revolution.
Are There Musical Theater Precedents?
Playwright Kirsten Greenidge resets Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment in Boston during the American Revolution. Here is a list of other musical theater pieces set during those tumultuous times.
By Robert Nesti
The Boston Lyric Opera’s upcoming production of Donizetti’s Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment (known in English as Daughter of the Regiment) at the Emerson Colonial Theatre on April 24, is being given a hometown spin.
The opera, first performed in Paris in 1840, was originally set during the Napoleonic Wars. For the BLO production, playwright Kirsten Greenidge has moved the action to Revolutionary-era Boston, with the heroine, Marie, reimagined in the spirit of Deborah Sampson, a Massachusetts woman who disguised herself as a man to fight for independence. What was once a French camp comedy about soldiers and a foundling girl has become, in Greenidge’s hands, a patriotic toast to America at 250. (For more on Sampson, follow this link.)
Donizetti could not have known, when he wrote La Fille du Régiment in 1840, that his comic foundling girl would end up in Revolutionary Boston inspired by a cross-dressing woman who fought for a new nation that would not give her the vote. But Greenidge knew and creates a work that may be light in tone, but beneath the surface raises deeper questions about entitlement and democratic values.
For more on the Boston Lyric Opera production of The Daughter of the Regiment, follow this link.
But are there other instances has the American Revolution been the backdrop for musical theater and opera? In turns out a number of times over the past century – from Rodgers and Hart a hundred years ago to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton and a chamber opera about John and Abigail Adams, the fight for American independence has acted as a backdrop for a number of musical theater pieces. It is worth noting that three of the six works above center on women—women who charm, outwit, or outlast the men making the official history.
Dearest Enemy · First performed: September 18, 1925
Music: Richard Rodgers · Lyrics: Lorenz Hart · Book: Herbert Fields · Knickerbocker Theatre, New York
The first Broadway musical by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (their first full book show) has a premise drawn from a real incident: in September 1776, socialite Mary Lindley Murray entertained General William Howe and his British officers at her Manhattan home long enough for General Putnam to spirit Washington’s surrounded troops to safety. Hart reportedly got the idea from a plaque he spotted near the Murray Hill district in Manhattan. The resulting musical was described by one historian as “a native operetta” that made the pointed suggestion that colonial women had opinions about sex—a fairly radical position for 1925 Broadway, where the revolutionary content extended well beyond the period setting.
Herbert Fields’ book centered on Betsy Burke, fiercely patriotic niece of Mrs. Murray, who falls for a British captain even as she helps detain his regiment overnight so Washington can regroup. The show ran 286 performances, which was a respectable run for its era, and launched the Rodgers and Hart partnership in earnest. Its elegant, Jerome Kern-influenced score is largely forgotten today (though it produce a standard, “Here in My Arms.”; but Dearest Enemy holds a specific place of honor as the first in a long line of Broadway shows to ask what the Revolution looked like from the perspective of the women left behind. The show, though, has never been revived on Broadway, though it turn up on live television in 1955 starring Anne Jeffreys and Cyril Ritchard, with an adaptation by Neil Simon; and was recorded in 2012 with Kim Criswell utilizing the original orchestrations.
Arms and the Girl · First performed: February 2, 1950
Music: Morton Gould · Lyrics & Book: Dorothy Fields, Herbert Fields, Rouben Mamoulian · 46th Street Theatre, New York
Arms and the Girl is a play on the title ofGeorge Bernard Shaw’s anti-armament’s comedy Arms and the Man, though it has less to do with weapons than romance and a social convention of the day. That was “bundling,” a custom in which unmarried couples would sleep together fully-clothed with a board between them. In this case, the couple was a patriotic Connecticut woman who falls for a Hessian deserter, who identifies more with the values he’s been fighting against.
The musical was to be Nanette Fabray’s breakout role, but that belonged to Pearl Bailey as a runaway slave traveling under the name of whatever colony she happened to be in at the time. Bailey had relatively little to do with the plot, but every time the stage cleared she stopped the show, particularly with the buoyant “There Must Be Something Better Than Love.” The show ran only 134 performances, and Morton Gould/Dorothy Field score has not received the revivals it may deserve. But Bailey’s presence was a pointed reminder of whose freedom the Revolution did and did not deliver—a theme the musical itself only glanced at before moving on.
Ben Franklin in Paris · First performed: October 27, 1964
Music: Mark Sandrich Jr. · Book & Lyrics: Sidney Michaels · Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, New York
Robert Preston in Ben Franklin in Paris. (New York City Library)
Diplomacy is the subject of this 1964 musical that follows Ben Franklin’s attempt to secure support for the new American republic from King Louis XVI. To do so, he rekindles a romance with a French countess, who is a favorite of the monarch. What made the musical an occasion was the return to the musical stage of Robert Preston as Franklin. He was well-cast as the New York Times observed, “if anyone can charm the French court into granting recognition to a new nation, Mr. Preston can.”
But despite its star power, a lavish production, and a dramatic 11’o clock curtain, Ben Franklin’s musical journey to Paris didn’t attract audiences. It closed after 215 performances and is rarely revived, in part because it was so tailored to Preston’s personality. Preston may have wowed them in Iowa as Harold Hill, but his turn as Franklin was less persuasive.
1776 · First performed: March 16, 1969
Music & Lyrics: Sherman Edwards · Book: Peter Stone · 46th Street Theatre, New York
One of the most successful of musicals set during the American Revolution is this 1969 hit that famously beat Hair for the Tony Award. It is easy to understand why – the book by Peter Stone parsed the political intrigues of the Founding Fathers in the days before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and did so with humor and high theatrics; and the score by pop songwriter made light of 18th century musical conventions within the confines of a 20th century American musical. Many predicted that a musical with a dancing Ben Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was the stuff of Broadway disaster, but it surprised many and became a long-running (some 1217 performances) hit.
Perhaps because it probed deeply into the hypocrisy of the North concerning the slave trade, or that it humanized figures from junior high history books, but 1776 proved that Edwards idea for a musical based on the writing and signing of the Declaration of Independence was a worthy one. A recent revival by the American Repertory Theater in which all the roles were played by women and non-binary actors attempted to give the musical a 21st century spin without rewriting a word, but it only pointed out the more kitschy aspects of the property itself.
Hamilton · First performed: January 20, 2015 (Off-Broadway); July 13, 2015 (Broadway)
Music, Lyrics & Book: Lin-Manuel Miranda · Richard Rodgers Theatre, New York
How do you tell the story of the Founding Fathers in the 21st century? Lin-Manuel Miranda’s solution is to make them rap. went further—making them rap. It was a conceit that paid off in a musical that erupted to success when it first appeared at The Public Theater in January 2015. In a journey reminiscent of A Chorus Line and Rent, Hamilton made its way uptown that summer and has been running ever since with weeks recently surpassing the $2,000,000 mark in grosses.
What makes it great? Simply Miranda’s skillful telling of Alexander Hamilton’s life in pop music terms and one of the best musical stagings (by Thomas Kail) in recent times. It made stars of Miranda (who played Hamilton in the original cast) and Leslie Odom, Jr. (as her adversary Aaron Burr). He would took home the Tony Award as Best Actor in a Musical that year, one of the 11 it would win, along with the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But more recently critics—including Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow’s subjects themselves—have questioned whether the musical’s warm portrait of the Founders soft-pedals the institution of slavery in ways that 1776’s revival refused to. That tension is real and worth sitting with. It does not, however, diminish what Miranda accomplished: a work of musical theater so ferocious in its craft that it rewrote what the form was capable of.
My Dearest Friend · First performed: 2016
Music: Patricia Leonard · Chamber Opera · United States
The only real opera on this list is also the least-known work, My Dearest Friend by composer Patricia Leonard. It takes its title from the salutation John Adams habitually used in letters to his wife Abigail, centering on the epistolary relationship between America’s second president and the woman who was arguably its sharpest political mind the center of its dramatic world. In this chamber opera, Leonard draws the texts from the actual correspondence between John and Abigail during the years of the Revolution, a period in which she was managing the family farm in Massachusetts while he was in Philadelphia or abroad, and trading with him some of the most politically astute letters in American history.
Abigail’s famous admonition to the Continental Congress to “remember the ladies”—and Adams’ rather breezy dismissal of it—is, in the opera, not merely an anecdote but a dramatic pivot that reveals both the depth of their partnership and its structural limits. Coming in the same year as the Hamilton phenomenon, its quiet insistence on Abigail’s centrality felt like a necessary corrective.