1776 (musical): Difference between revisions

{{tropelist}}

* [[Absentee Actor]]: On the original Broadway cast recording, thanks to Howard da Silva's heart attack just before opening night. That's his understudy, Rex Everhart, singing Franklin.

* [[Acting for Two]]: Standard practice in the straw hat circuit tours during the 1970s. Livingston and Morris, the delegates from New York, were frequently played by the same actor. And in a production number cut after the initial tryout, most of the cast doubled as (mostly incompetent) soldiers.

* [[Aluminum Christmas Trees]]: The show is filled with odd or bizarre details that are ''true'', discovered because its authors [[Shown Their Work|did an amazing amount of research]]. For instance, Benjamin Franklin is carried into Congress in a sedan chair, but it's not because he's [[Too Important to Walk]] -- it's because his gout is acting up and he ''can't'' walk (and the servants carrying him were prisoners from the local jail). Sometimes the details were so hard to believe, the writers had to ignore or change them [[Reality Is Unrealistic|because they were afraid the audience would think they had made it up.]] The most significant example of this would be a line taken from something [[John Adams]] wrote in one of his letters -- that if the Founding Fathers did not ban slavery, "there will be trouble a hundred years hence." The writers had to modify the line because if they quoted it word-for-word no one would believe they hadn't put those words in Adams' mouth with the clarity of a century of hindsight.