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Theater review: 3 Summers of Lincoln
La Jolla Playhouse premieres a new political musical
Full disclosure: your humble correspondent has never seen Hamilton. So I can’t make any sort of informed judgment about whether or not La Jolla Playhouse has succeeded in Hamiltoning Lincoln with its new musical. (And it is very much a musical, song after song hitting climax after climax, with occasional breaks for speech and breath-catching.) I can’t even say for certain whether it set out to do so, though the program’s mention of a “compellingly contemporary sound” and the integration of “language from both then and now” provides some suggestions along those lines, as does the pulsing plethora of triple rhymes: “an oasis that erases all traces,” “mattered/shattered/battered,” “schemes/seams/dreams,” etc. And it would certainly make narrative sense to follow a creator with a savior, one who wrestled with the founding’s flaw of allowing slavery.
Upcoming Event
3 Summers of Lincoln
- Saturday, March 15, 2025, 2 p.m.
- La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, San Diego
- Age Limit: All ages / $30 - $103
The proscenium frames the story: it’s covered in type, symbols and characters of all fonts and sizes, the sort you might place into a printing press if you were publishing something: an abolitionist newspaper, say, or even a Presidential proclamation. There may be a civil war on, but the drama here will be driven by the exchange of words, not bullets. Even the bravura opening action — a one-legged Union soldier dancing in place at a furious pace — suggests the pounding clack that produces a telegram, the sort Lincoln keeps sending to the weirdly immovable General McClellan. Here we are, as the opening number informs us, on day 430 of this 90-day war, and the man simply will not budge. Lincoln calls him “a general so inactive he makes Hamlet look quite swift” — the first of a great many references to Shakespeare. (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” asks the black William Slade. Words, words, words.)
Lincoln is both baffled and frustrated by McClellan’s stolidity, which is kind of funny, since the nation’s blacks feel the same way about him — though the boasting anthem “Nothing Without Us” may be a bit of hyperbole, Lincoln’s hesitance to integrate the Army rightly rankles. And the President feels it too, declaring in song, Am I a man of inaction/drowning in doubt?/When they write history/I hope they leave this part out! It’s a little cute, but at the same time, whatever he may have said at Gettysburg about being little noted nor long remembered, Lincoln knows that the outcome of the war will prove momentous. As he notes more than once: “Without struggle, there is no progress.”
Which brings us to the man he says that to: Frederick Douglass, a former slave who embodies and expresses his race’s frustration with Lincoln. Douglass’s path to freedom first opened up when a white woman — the wife of his owner — taught him to read. Now he’s publishing a newspaper and fulminating against the pusillanimous President. Again: words are what matter here. (Singing matters too, of course, and Quentin Earl Darrington’s declaration of self in “Here I Am” is a stunning followup punch to Ivan Hernandez’s already powerful introduction of Lincoln in “This Impossible Position.”)
And words are both the glory of the play’s first act and the trouble with its second. The action Lincoln moves toward in act one is issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, a calculated but still enormous risk. Will Union soldiers accept the black volunteers that followed in its wake? Will abolitionists accept its cautious decision to say nothing about slavery in Union states? It’s remarkable how thrilling book writer (and co-songwriter) Joe DiPietro makes the machinations, thanks in part to the onstage clashes of personalities and ideas.
In the second act, much of the significant action takes place offstage. (Both dramatically and musically, the highlight of act two is the meeting between Lincoln and Douglass, in which each impresses and is humbled by the other.) There’s plenty of drama. Will Atlanta fall? Will Lincoln be re-elected by his war-weary armed forces? But the former is independent of the onstage action and the latter is fallout from act one.
Perhaps sensing the slackening, the show goes super-big for the finale, not just in sound, but in fury. It unleashes against the hesitation that dogged Lincoln at the outset, having him declare, Progress loses leadership/when delay pulls the plough/A liberal relies on ‘later’/but a radical shouts ‘now.’ It’s tempting to shout along in fellow feeling, but it’s not the story we’ve just seen, in which caution and consideration — waiting for a victory at Antietam, for instance — prove to be precious tools.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Theater review: 3 Summers of Lincoln
La Jolla Playhouse premieres a new political musical
Theater review: 3 Summers of Lincoln
La Jolla Playhouse premieres a new political musical
Full disclosure: your humble correspondent has never seen Hamilton. So I can’t make any sort of informed judgment about whether or not La Jolla Playhouse has succeeded in Hamiltoning Lincoln with its new musical. (And it is very much a musical, song after song hitting climax after climax, with occasional breaks for speech and breath-catching.) I can’t even say for certain whether it set out to do so, though the program’s mention of a “compellingly contemporary sound” and the integration of “language from both then and now” provides some suggestions along those lines, as does the pulsing plethora of triple rhymes: “an oasis that erases all traces,” “mattered/shattered/battered,” “schemes/seams/dreams,” etc. And it would certainly make narrative sense to follow a creator with a savior, one who wrestled with the founding’s flaw of allowing slavery.
Upcoming Event
3 Summers of Lincoln
- Saturday, March 15, 2025, 2 p.m.
- La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, San Diego
- Age Limit: All ages / $30 - $103
The proscenium frames the story: it’s covered in type, symbols and characters of all fonts and sizes, the sort you might place into a printing press if you were publishing something: an abolitionist newspaper, say, or even a Presidential proclamation. There may be a civil war on, but the drama here will be driven by the exchange of words, not bullets. Even the bravura opening action — a one-legged Union soldier dancing in place at a furious pace — suggests the pounding clack that produces a telegram, the sort Lincoln keeps sending to the weirdly immovable General McClellan. Here we are, as the opening number informs us, on day 430 of this 90-day war, and the man simply will not budge. Lincoln calls him “a general so inactive he makes Hamlet look quite swift” — the first of a great many references to Shakespeare. (“If you prick us, do we not bleed?” asks the black William Slade. Words, words, words.)
Lincoln is both baffled and frustrated by McClellan’s stolidity, which is kind of funny, since the nation’s blacks feel the same way about him — though the boasting anthem “Nothing Without Us” may be a bit of hyperbole, Lincoln’s hesitance to integrate the Army rightly rankles. And the President feels it too, declaring in song, Am I a man of inaction/drowning in doubt?/When they write history/I hope they leave this part out! It’s a little cute, but at the same time, whatever he may have said at Gettysburg about being little noted nor long remembered, Lincoln knows that the outcome of the war will prove momentous. As he notes more than once: “Without struggle, there is no progress.”
Which brings us to the man he says that to: Frederick Douglass, a former slave who embodies and expresses his race’s frustration with Lincoln. Douglass’s path to freedom first opened up when a white woman — the wife of his owner — taught him to read. Now he’s publishing a newspaper and fulminating against the pusillanimous President. Again: words are what matter here. (Singing matters too, of course, and Quentin Earl Darrington’s declaration of self in “Here I Am” is a stunning followup punch to Ivan Hernandez’s already powerful introduction of Lincoln in “This Impossible Position.”)
And words are both the glory of the play’s first act and the trouble with its second. The action Lincoln moves toward in act one is issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, a calculated but still enormous risk. Will Union soldiers accept the black volunteers that followed in its wake? Will abolitionists accept its cautious decision to say nothing about slavery in Union states? It’s remarkable how thrilling book writer (and co-songwriter) Joe DiPietro makes the machinations, thanks in part to the onstage clashes of personalities and ideas.
In the second act, much of the significant action takes place offstage. (Both dramatically and musically, the highlight of act two is the meeting between Lincoln and Douglass, in which each impresses and is humbled by the other.) There’s plenty of drama. Will Atlanta fall? Will Lincoln be re-elected by his war-weary armed forces? But the former is independent of the onstage action and the latter is fallout from act one.
Perhaps sensing the slackening, the show goes super-big for the finale, not just in sound, but in fury. It unleashes against the hesitation that dogged Lincoln at the outset, having him declare, Progress loses leadership/when delay pulls the plough/A liberal relies on ‘later’/but a radical shouts ‘now.’ It’s tempting to shout along in fellow feeling, but it’s not the story we’ve just seen, in which caution and consideration — waiting for a victory at Antietam, for instance — prove to be precious tools.
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