Those Singing, Dancing Founding Fathers

If it's the Fourth of July, then it must be 1776.

Okay, it's near-impossible for the day to pass without me bringing up That Musical and playing a song from it.  I've written about the show extensively before, so I won't repeat all that again, but you can find the in-depth article here.  Among other things, it addresses not only many of the important points about the show's interesting history, with its score by Sherman Edwards and book by Peter Stone, but also gives deserving praise to the one sore spot of the film, the clownish staging of Ronald Holgate in "The Lees of Old Virginia," for which he rightly won the Tony Award on Broadway.  (It was the first show on Broadway I ever saw, and Holgate brought the house down.  What they did in the staging of the number in the film was near-criminal according to show biz law...)

In 1971, the Tony Awards celebrated its 25th anniversary, and put on what I think may be the greatest TV special ever.  In addition to presenting all the regular awards and Best Musical numbers, they brought back the original stars from each of the previous 25 Best Musical winners to re-create their iconic number from those shows.  

Here representing its Best Musical win in 1969, here are William Daniels and Virginia Vestoff reuniting for "Yours, Yours, Yours," which they later recreated in the film, as John and Abigail Adams write letters to each other long distance.