the humanities film series presents

1776

Friday, September 21 at 7 PM

ETC Lecture Hall

The score for this Broadway musical turned Hollywood film was written by Sherman Edwards, a former high school history teacher who wrote portions of the dialogue and some of the song lyrics working from the letters and memoirs of the actual participants of the Second Continental Congress. The film features the struggles of the founders, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin among others, as the Congress worked to come to agreement on the Declaration of Independence. Featuring such rousing musical numbers as “Piddle, Twiddle and Resolve” and “Molasses to Rum,” 1776 will undoubtedly give you a new point of view on how America came to be.

Vincent Canby’s original review in The New York Times may suggest its continuing appeal: “The lyrics sound as if they’d been written by someone high on root beer…yet 1776…insists on being so entertaining and, at times, even moving, that you might as well stop resisting it.”