Picture Boston before the break: candlelit print shops where ink is muscle, taverns where songs travel faster than sermons, and a city learning, line by line, how to speak back. Broadside is a folk musical about the early Revolution told through the people who made language contagious; Paul Revere, Sam Adams, and Mercy Otis Warren, all working with the Gazette and turning rumor into argument, argument into print, and print into action. But a revolution can’t live on paper alone. It needs a network.
In Broadside, Dr. Joseph Warren moves through the Freemasons, a world where not everyone is on the same side, and Loyalists and Patriots share the same rooms and rituals. That mixed company makes the stakes higher…and the messages harder to move. So the truly “top secret” intel doesn’t travel in plain speech. It travels in plain sight. Enter the Needle Guard, three formidable women who become the safest channel in Boston:
- Abigail Adams: Writer and Womens Rights Advocate
- Sarah Bradlee Fulton: Mother of the Boston Tea Party
- Mercy Otis Warren: The Conscience of the Revolution
In this retelling, their messages aren’t only whispered, they’re stitched. Codes tucked into hems. Signals hidden in seams. Needlework as espionage. Fully documented? Not always. Historically plausible? Absolutely and theatrically irresistible.
Why It Matters
As the U.S. approaches 250 years, Broadside asks: who gets to define the moment while it’s happening? Revolutions don’t start in marble. They start in print shops, taverns, kitchens, and sewing rooms, where courage looks like ink on your hands and a secret in your lining.
Eyes on Denver
We’re sharpening the type and tightening the strings for the quarter-millennial year. Until then: keep your lanterns ready, your broadsides closer than your opinions, and if someone’s stitching looks a little too careful… maybe don’t ask what’s in the lining.
#BroadsideTheMusical #250Years #RevolutionaryBoston #NewMusical #AmericanStories
