The three-hour length of 1776 at Lyric Stage Company of Boston (through October 14) is punishing too, but for different reasons. The Tony-winning 1969 musical by Peter Stone (book) and Sherman Edwards (songs) about the writing of the Declaration of Independence is an ambitious project for the Lyric’s compact space. And with a cast of 27, a seven-man band (discreetly hidden above the stage), and a glittering array of Georgian outfits (Gail Astrid Buckley is listed as “costume coordinator”), the production initiates the company’s 33rd season extravagantly. But the Stone/Edwards treatment of American history as costume farce and operetta is at best fatuous and at worst depressing. Did lines like “We’re waiting for the chirp, chirp, chirp/Of an eaglet being born/ . . . In this congressional incubator” really once thrill audiences — and Tony voters? At this juncture — three and a half decades after the pallid movie version, with the stars of the Broadway cast, appeared and then quickly vanished — the musical feels like an antiquated embarrassment, something thought up by overzealous students in an undergraduate musical-theater class. The fathers of our country hold onto their powdered wigs as they prance about the stage in a series of jigs and minuets with titles like “He Plays the Violin” (a wink-wink double-entendre tribute to Thomas Jefferson’s sexual athleticism) — though in this production, sparsely choreographed by Ilyse Robbins, the prancing is more hinted at than actualized. The lyrics are self-consciously naughty (“I’m only 35, I still have my virility/And I can romp through Cupid’s grove with great agility”), faux satirical (“Cool, Considerate Men,” where the conservatives in Congress dance “to the right/Ever to the right/Not ever to the left/But ever to the right”), or — worst of all — sanctimonious (the histrionic aria “Molasses to Rum,” which takes on the topic of the slave trade). And the music goes way back beyond the modern musical theater to the heyday of Rudolf Friml’s Naughty Marietta and Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince.
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