Love Philly? So do we. Let’s be friends. Sign up for the Billy Penn newsletter today.

Once upon a time, nearly 50 years before Lin-Manuel Miranda’s shot at history with “Hamilton” there was another blockbuster American history musical, “1776: The Musical.”

Everyone bought tickets. Everyone went. The magic of theater, with the way the scripts and music bought dry characters to life, made “1776” such a hit that, in 1972, the play, which debuted on Broadway in 1969, became a movie.

Now, “1776” is back again, just in time to celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday at the nation’s oldest theater, Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre. The musical, on stage now, runs through May 31.

But the Walnut, founded in 1808, 32 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, isn’t the only theater in town presenting shows in honor of the semiquincentennial.  (Extra points if you can pronounce semiquincentennial or say it five times real fast!)

On stage now at the Lantern Theater Co. through June 7 is Lloyd Suh’s “Franklinland,” The play explores the explosive relationship between Benjamin Franklin and his loyalist son William, who rebels against his father and becomes the Royal Governor of New Jersey.

In June, Pig Iron Theatre Co. will present “Franklin’s Key,” a sci-fi thriller with magical stage effects, starring two teenagers who need to protect Ben Franklin’s technologies from dark forces that threaten to upend civilization.

Skipping ahead a few decades, the Wilma offers “The America Play,” about a gravedigger turned Abraham Lincoln impersonator. Wilma’s co-artistic director Lindsay Smiling, who not only stars as Lincoln, but is also directing the play, gets assassinated five or six times in every performance.

Appropriately titled for the semiquincentennial, “The America Play,” May 19-31, comes on the heels of Wilma’s previous historical/hysterical production, “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington,” about the first First Lady’s fears concerning the enslaved people in her household.

At the Walnut, Jeffrey Coon, the theatre’s development director, returns to the stage as Richard Henry Lee, the likeable delegate to the Continental Congress from Virginia who actually proposed the motion that the colonies split from England.

This is Coon’s second time acting in “1776” at the Walnut. Twenty-nine years ago, when he was 26 and Walnut first staged “1776,” Coon played a courier who gets beat up.

Coon admires both “1776” and “Hamilton.” In an ideal world, he said, he’d love to see them in repertory rotation, with one show offered for the matinee and the other in the evening.

Isaac Ripley, Jordan Eck, and Bill Van Horn appear in Walnut Street Theatre’s “1776.” (courtesy Walnut Street Theatre)

“They were both revolutionary,” he said. “Both took a novel approach to what we all assumed we learned in junior high school. They both let the story and the humans who inhabit it become much more of a presence than they ever were in textbooks.”

Coon hopes the audience will leave “1776” appreciating how wonderful and rare it was for a group of people to decide to break away from their own country. “By all rights,” he said, “this should have never worked.”

But for our nation’s birth to work, people with strong and different opinions “had to come to the table and have the discussion because they cared for the greater good,” he said. That’s a lesson for our time.”

“Gosh, it’s funny,” Coon said. “It’s not this stodgy history lesson.”

Scott Greer’s Benjamin Franklin nods off in Walnut Street Theatre’s “1776”. (courtesy Walnut Street Theatre)

“Most people who know the show like it. People who don’t know the show come and realize how damn funny it is. It’s a really great play and really great music. The script is so cracker-jack good. It’s so smart.”

At the Wilma, the underlying message of “The America Play” has to do with how we understand ourselves and our history. What or who is left out?

“For me, this is about how we interact with history. How we tell stories, how the past has effects on what we do today,” Smiling said.

In theatrical studies, he explained, the play is sliced and diced as students appreciate its unique writing and try to parse its many meanings.

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, a Pulitzer-Prize winner who once had a residency at the Wilma, is known for her rep-and-rev style. Rep and rev stands for repetition and revision. Evoking jazz rhythms, phrases appear again and again throughout the play, each time inviting deeper consideration of their meaning.

“It breaks form. It’s non-linear. It is very dense with historical references. It’s dense with word play and metaphor and abstraction. It takes a lot of work to understand what’s going on. It takes a lot to unpack it,” Smiling said. “Instead of the focus narrowing, it keeps expanding.”

Wilma Co-Artistic Director Lindsay Smiling directs and stars as ‘The Foundling Father,’ a Black Abraham Lincoln impersonator in the Wilma Theater’s upcoming production of The America Play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks (Courtesy of the Wilma Theater)

Smiling plays a gravedigger, a Black Abraham Lincoln impersonator known as the “Foundling Father.” He runs “The Great Hole of History,” a tourist attraction. Turns out that what makes it popular is that tourists who pay the penny price can assassinate the president – over and over again.

The Abraham Lincoln show takes place in a hole, creating a challenge for set designer Matthew Zumbo. Smiling said the entire theater is turned into a hole with old props hanging everywhere. “In the midst of it,” Smiling said, “there is a huge 16-foot Abraham Lincoln head that is almost this deity, this icon.”

Other American history-focused plays

  • “The Woman Question,” through May 24, People’s Light, 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern, 610-644-3500. A world premiere of a docu-fantasy about the 1894 class of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania who pushed for women’s health and reproductive freedom. Founded in 1850, the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania was the first American medical college to teach women medicine and allow them to earn the degree of Doctor of Medicine.
  • “Waiting for Westy,” May 21-31, Yellow Bicycle Collective, Yellow Bicycle Theater, 1435 Arch St. 2d floor, Phila. In time for Memorial Day, a group of Vietnam veterans struggles with their feelings about the war the night before a new Vietnam War monument will be unveiled in South Philadelphia.
  • “The Great Privation (How to Flip Ten Cents Into A Dollar),” May 28-June 14, Theatre Exile, 1340 S. 13th St., Phila., 215-218-4022, In 1832, a mother and daughter keep vigil at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Philly in this comic play about America’s long practice of harming Black bodies in the name of science.