A Nation in the Making: 1776 at Ford's Theatre

There are few places in Washington, D.C. better suited to a musical about the birth of the United States than Ford's Theatre, the storied E Street venue whose walls are themselves saturated in American history. As the country approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, Ford's Theatre has seized the moment with a production of 1776 that feels both historically resonant and urgently alive — a reminder that the ideals this nation was built upon were never as clean or inevitable as the history books suggest.

1776 at Ford's Theatre in DC

The musical, with book by Peter Stone and music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards, made its Broadway debut in 1969, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical and becoming the first musical ever performed at the White House. The show dramatizes the events of the summer of 1776, when the Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia and John Adams labored, against considerable resistance, to bring the delegates to a unanimous vote for independence from Great Britain. Everyone in the audience knows how it ends — but 1776 earns its drama not through surprise but through the deeply human portrait it paints of the men behind the moment. These are not marble statues. They brawl, they stall, they love, and they compromise in ways that sometimes make the jaw drop.

Director Luis Salgado frames the show as a kind of living museum exhibit, with the stage dressed as a Ford's Theatre America 250 Special Interactive Exhibit — costumed mannequins, period artifacts, and a reproduction of John Trumbull's famous painting of the signing ceremony all on display as "tourists" gradually transform into the historical figures themselves. It's a clever conceit that pays off handsomely by the final curtain, reinforcing just how thin the membrane is between then and now. It is also impossible to ignore the shadow of Abraham Lincoln in a space like this — a president whose Gettysburg Address drew directly from the Declaration of Independence, and who was, of course, assassinated in this very theatre less than a century after the events on stage.

Jonathan Atkinson anchors the show as John Adams, bringing a pointed, combustible energy to a man history remembers as principled but whom his contemporaries found relentlessly aggravating. His Adams is all nervy conviction, and the performance is as comedically sharp as it is emotionally grounded. When a weary Congress responds to Adams' ceaseless agitations with the opening number "For God's Sake, John, Sit Down!," it's one of the production's most purely entertaining sequences. Beside him, Jake Lowenthal offers a beautifully understated Thomas Jefferson — youthful, sensitive, and quietly wrestling with the weight of what's being asked of him. And as Abigail Adams, Kanysha Williams brings an assertive, deeply sympathetic presence to the role, shining in her solo "Compliments" and in her tender exchanges with Atkinson that ground the show's political whirlwind in something genuinely personal.

Together with Derrick Truby, Jr.'s Benjamin Franklin, Atkinson and Lowenthal form the beating heart of the production. Truby's Franklin is a particular delight — sophisticated, earthy, sly, and magnetically theatrical. His wit and warmth carry the show through its longer procedural stretches, and his presence on stage commands the room with the ease of someone who has always known exactly how to work a crowd.

The supporting ensemble is exceptional across the board. With some 26 speaking roles drawn from the ranks of DC's theatre community, the production never flags in its character work. Michael Perrie, Jr. brings irresistible, high-kicking enthusiasm to the Virginian Richard Henry Lee, turning "The Lees of Old Virginia" into the production's most joyfully energetic number. Hunter Ringsmith haunts the show as the Continental Army Courier, arriving with Washington's dispatches each time more worn and haggard than the last, until his duet with Ricky DeVon Hall in "Momma, Look Sharp" delivers a percussion-heavy, genuinely moving dirge for the fallen — a tonal shift that lands with quiet devastation.

And then there is Joe Mallon as South Carolina's Edward Rutledge, whose demand that an anti-slavery passage be struck from Jefferson's draft forces the show's most harrowing scene. His calypso-inflected "Molasses to Rum" — a bitter, high-energy indictment of the Atlantic slave trade and the delegates' collective complicity in it — is one of the most striking numbers in the production, implicating everyone on stage, and everyone in the house, in America's original sin. It is to Sherman Edwards' lasting credit that he does not flinch from this moment but instead gives it one of the show's most theatrically arresting settings.

This production also makes meaningful use of its diverse casting. The original 1969 Broadway production was all-white, but here more than ten African American and Asian American actors populate the stage, including Truby's Franklin, Justine Moral's Martha Jefferson, and both John Floyd and Jay Frisby in roles that carry particular resonance given the Declaration's language about all men being created equal. The show's final number, in which a despairing Adams asks "Is anybody there? Does anybody care?" in an empty meeting hall, takes on an added dimension when Floyd's Secretary Thomson briefly joins him — a reminder of how long and incomplete the journey from those words to their fulfillment would prove to be.

Salgado has done remarkable work assembling and staging a cast this large on Ford's intimate stage. Milagros Ponce de León's set design and Clint Allen's projections open the space in ways that feel almost architectural, while Ivania Stack's period costumes give each character a distinct visual identity — including a coat for Richard Henry Lee fashioned from what appears to be a painted landscape, a small touch of swaggering genius. Daniel Gutierrez's orchestrations, conducted by Clay Ostwald from the keyboard, bring a jangly, big-band energy to Edwards' score that breathes new life into the material and builds toward a finale that lands with both the weight of history and a touch of foreboding.

1776 is the kind of show that means different things in different eras, and this production understands that the work of democracy — messy, contentious, and always unfinished — is never truly behind us. It is a rousing, emotionally rich piece of theatre, and Ford's has given it a production equal to the occasion and the house. 1776 runs through May 16, 2026.