A second flood, a simple famine, plagues of locusts everywhere

I had just written an intensely miserable post about the state of my life and my health and whatever was supposed to have passed for my career, but then I discovered the existence of the 1970 London cast recording of 1776 and it surprised me into laughing out loud, specifically because while I had never heard anyone but William Daniels as John Adams and I expect no one again to match his particular abrasive flint, Lewis Fiander couldn't have been terrible from the amount of incredulous disgust he puts into his "Good God." Anything to do with American democracy is of course somewhat depressing to contemplate at the present moment, but not more so from a musical than from the news. In other charms of the week, I have two different kinds of infection in a body that is already not responding as hoped to several months of medicating for an underlying condition, so anything that distracts me from mere grim hanging on to someday reading other people's death notices is a net good.

My life's a crooked mess of things I've broken with my head

My paramount goal for last night was sleep and it failed so horrifically that I have had a flat and frustratingly nonexistent day, but in listening to the three different cast recordings of 1776 which I now own—1969 Broadway, 1970 London, and 1972 film—and rewatching a handful of scenes from the handily streaming film, thirty years after initial exposure in eighth grade social studies it finally clicked with me that so much of the appeal of its John Adams is directly proportional to his being such a disaster. Especially as incarnated by the superbly obstreperous William Daniels, the delegate from Massachusetts is simultaneously an incandescent engine of rage against the machines of tyranny and an indignant wet cat of a man endowed with the inalienable right of shooting himself in the foot, cf. the opening number devoted to establishing that he has achieved the political and personal milestone of pissing off an entire continental congress. His capacity for chill is somewhere in the decatherms and he wasn't even close enough to the door to be standing behind it when social finesse was handed out. He has the self-aware saving grace of a sense of humor which quirks out in unsuccessfully repressed smiles, but he's the awkward straight man just as often as he snarks drily for the Colonies; one of the best details of his physical acting is a nervous flicker of the fingers which stands sometimes for constant restive thought and sometimes for not knowing what the hell to do with his hands. It's not a comic characterization, but it does make the moments where he lets his guard down all the more quietly effective, because too often it's punctured for him. His own personality is among the obstacles of policy, philosophy, and factionalism facing a successful declaration of independence and down to the wire the play never lets him forget it. He dances so gravely and gracefully with Blythe Danner's Martha Washington, he earns the smugness with which he calls across to Howard da Silva as they whirl into the showiest choreography of the song, "We still do a few things in Boston, Franklin!" Who wasn't supposed to imprint on that unbeatable combination of furious integrity that shouldn't be let out unsupervised for five minutes? Damn this government for making any national celebration so meanly jingoistic, I couldn't even think about attending this spring's sestercentennial of the Battle of Lexington in my eighteenth-century shirt.