Before the Bayonets, There Were Ballrooms: Margaret Gage Before the Intolerables

In the mid 1760s, the Gages weren’t “Boston people” yet, they were New York people. After Thomas Gage’s promotion, he and Margaret Kemble Gage set up house on Broad Street in New York City, where Margaret moved like a polished Loyalist hostess and their home became a hub of imperial society. New York was the command center: dinners, alliances, manners, an empire that still believed it could be charming.

The Gage's home in New York became a hub of imperial society.

But Boston kept dragging the story north. In 1768, Gage backed the decision to occupy Boston with regular troops, a show of force that only sharpened the city’s fury and by 1770 the pressure cooker blows with the Boston Massacre. Even when he’s physically based in New York, he’s managing Boston’s crisis, insisting the “unhappy affair” be handled with full documentation and control, because he knows the street isn’t just angry; it’s watching.

The Gage family visits the family estate in Sussex

In June 1773, the family finally sails for England, less a triumphant homecoming than a strategic exhale. Sussex is the old-rooted world: the Gage family’s seat and countryside stability, the place where “home” is supposed to mean walls that don’t argue back. And yet the Atlantic won’t stay quiet, news arrives that Massachusetts is inflamed again, now with politics turning personal.

Thomas Gage replaces Governor Hutchinson and enforces the Intolerables Act

Then comes the pivot: the Hutchinson letters hit Boston in mid-1773 and explode into outrage, and the crisis accelerates into Parliament’s punitive response after the Tea Party. In spring 1774 Hutchinson is out, and Gage is sent in, a soldier and administrator deemed steady enough to enforce the new order. He arrives in Boston 13 May 1774 and starts implementing the Coercive (“Intolerable”) Acts: not persuasion now, but policy backed by bayonets. New York society and Sussex calm are gone; Boston is the assignment that becomes a siege.

Calling Denver Artists: Broadside Auditions at Regis University

If you’ve ever watched a post explode online, shared, remixed, argued over, turned into a meme, you already understand Revolutionary Boston. Because long before social media, there were broadsides: bold, fast, public prints plastered on walls and passed hand-to-hand. They were the era’s viral posts and in some ways America's first memes: sharp cartoons, savage satire, catchy slogans, and hot takes set in ink. The Revolution didn’t start with gunfire. It started with a feed. That’s what we’re celebrating this year as the U.S. approaches its 250th birthday: a brand-new musical called Broadside, about the people who turned paper into persuasion and noise into a movement.

Broadside Production Team (April, Kelly, Heather, Tanner)

Auditions: Feb 1 & 2 at Regis University
We’re casting now! Auditions are February 1st and 2nd at Regis University, and we’d love to meet performers who want to help build something timely, theatrical, and a little bit rowdy. Click HERE to register

Performances: July 4 weekend through August 15
We’re planning performances from July 4th weekend through August 15th, with Denver, Boston, and Edinburgh in our sights. It’s a summer built around history, but it’s also built around right now: how communities form, how messages spread, and how ordinary people decide to speak.

Want to join us?
We’re looking for eight Denver peeps who want to come along for the adventure, making the show here and helping carry it outward. If you’ve ever thought, “I want to be part of something that matters” this is your sign.

Details + registration: www.broadsidemusical.com

A Made-for-TMZ Moment: Hutchinson’s Letters

As the harmony in Broadside thickens, Governor Hutchinson storms into General Gage’s office with a damp issue of the Boston Gazette in his hand. He doesn’t bother with greetings. “They printed my letters.” Gage barely looks up. “I’ve seen it.” He’s already clocked the damage and he’s already thinking beyond Boston, because the scandal has been messy on both sides of the Atlantic.

Governor Hutchinson showing displeasure on his published personal letters

In London, the blame and gossip even produced a clumsy sword duel between gentlemen arguing over who was responsible, the kind of spectacle that would be funny if it weren’t tied to real power. Hutchinson calls it private correspondence turned into public punishment, his words “set in type like a public hanging.” Gage agrees it’s theft, but he keeps his response controlled. The letters weren’t pulled from a Boston drawer; they were obtained in London, and forwarded to Massachusetts. Now Boston has done what Boston does best: printed them and dared everyone to react.

London's famous duel when the bark was bigger than bite

Hutchinson wants force. “Then we crush the press. Edes and Gill, tonight.” Gage stops him with a simple consequence: soldiers at a print shop becomes the next headline. Hutchinson doesn’t care. He wants the source. He wants a name he can drag into daylight and blame for the whole thing. And when he says it's tied to “Revere” you can feel the scene tighten. Revere is visible. Revere has friends. Revere makes noise. Hutchinson wants to treat that as proof.

General Gage consoles Governor Hutchinson on his personal letters

Gage won’t give him a public show. He grants permission to question Paul Revere, but only with conditions: no public arrest, no roughing him up, questions only. Hutchinson agrees because he wants action more than he wants restraint. Gage ends the exchange with the line that explains the whole strategy: they’re after information, not a martyr. In Boston, the wrong kind of crackdown doesn’t end a scandal, it gives it a face.

Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolution’s Playwright

Mercy Otis Warren didn’t march in the street with a musket, she hosted the room where the marching orders got talked into existence. In Plymouth, she and her husband James Warren welcomed key Patriot leaders to their home, turning a fireside parlor into a kind of soft-lit headquarters: tea on the table, politics in the air, and the future being argued sentence by sentence.

Mercy Otis Warren and her husband hosting the Sons of Liberty

Mercy wrote the Revolution as theatre. She published biting political satires, The Adulateur (1772), The Defeat (1773), The Group (1775), using characters and scenes to make power look ridiculous and resistance look inevitable. And this wasn’t private journaling; The Defeat ran in installments in the Boston Gazette in 1773, meaning her “plays” could travel the city like gossip with ink on it.

Mercy Otis Warren encouraging a Saturday afternoon spinning bee

At the same time, women organized their own visible front of the boycott, what we often call the Daughters of Liberty. When British cloth became politically charged, they answered with homespun: spinning, weaving, and wearing American-made fabric as a public statement. “Spinning bees” weren’t quaint craft circles; they were demonstrations with fiber, groups gathering to spin together, producing thread and cloth while proving (in front of neighbors and newspapers) that the boycott had muscle.

Mercy Otis Warren watches a performance of one of her plays backstage

That’s the Mercy in Broadside: a woman who understands that politics is persuasion, and persuasion is performance. Historically, she used the tools she had; hosting, writing, publishing, to push the Patriot argument into the public bloodstream. At the Green Dragon she turns that truth into stage action: the same playwright’s instincts that could skewer governors on paper become the quick, comic “Three Drunken Maidens” distraction that gets the Needle Guard out of trouble, proof that sometimes the fastest way past a guard isn’t a sword… it’s a scene.

Dr. Joseph Warren: The Brain of the Operation

We first meet Dr. Joseph Warren in Broadside out in the open, running the opening town hall, speaking about rights the way a doctor names symptoms: plainly, urgently, so the room can’t pretend it’s fine. When he starts “The Liberty Song,” it isn’t nostalgia. It’s a public vow to turn a crowd into a chorus, and a chorus into a cause.

Dr. Joseph Warren leading the colonists in a chorus of the Liberty Song

But Warren knows a revolution can’t live on speeches alone. So the story slips with him into the quieter machinery: the lodge network. In our telling, it’s not a spooky secret society, it’s a real web of trust that crosses jobs, neighborhoods, even divided loyalties. Warren uses that existing structure of meetings, relationships, coded habits to move people and information without ringing the King’s alarm bell.

Dr. Joseph Warren leading a lodge meeting

From there, his leadership sharpens into its most dangerous form: the spy network, run with the Needle Guard. While official power watches uniforms and muskets, Warren invests in what power overlooks... women who can pass through rooms, letters, taverns, and “harmless” entertainment with soldiers looking on. The Needle Guard isn’t decoration or backup; they believe the end justifies the means.

Dr. Joseph Warren instructing the needle guard

And then the pivot: the message that sends Revere riding. In Broadside, the ride doesn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the last link in a chain Warren built on purpose. He sees the “maybe” turning into “now,” makes the call, and gets the warning into Revere’s hands. That handoff is Warren’s thesis: words become networks, networks become action, and action becomes history.

Governor Hutchinson: The Proclamation Boston Wouldn’t Let Stand

Governor Thomas Hutchinson enters Broadside as a Massachusetts-born Loyalist who genuinely believes he’s preventing catastrophe. He’s not chasing cruelty, he’s chasing containment: keep Boston from tipping from argument into riot, from satire into blood. He thinks of himself as the adult in the room, the one responsible for consequences nobody else wants to name.

Edes & Gill refuse to publish Governor Hutchinson's broadside

His primary instrument isn’t a sword; it’s official paper. A proclamation broadside, read aloud and posted publicly, is how he tries to make reality hold still: disperse, obey, return to order. Play him as someone who treats the document with ceremony, measured voice and controlled posture because he believes law is the only thing separating “society” from “mob.”

The Governor finds a printer and admires his proclamation broadside

Then the city answers back. His proclamations get mocked, sung over, and turned into fuel for the Patriot print machine; counter-broadsides, tavern choruses, laughter where he expects obedience. That’s where “us and them” is born for him: not as an idea, but as a feeling he looks up and realizes the crowd no longer sees a governor; they see an enemy.

The Three Drunken Maidens vandalize the Governor's broadside after their performance.

His arc tightens from calm authority to brittle enforcement. The tragedy is that his fear of chaos makes him reach for harsher control, which only proves the Patriots’ point and deepens the split. For an audition: play the public face as composed, even polite, then let one private crack show the man underneath: wounded, cornered, and terrified of what happens if his words stop working.

A Resignation? YES. How one small broadside turned Boston’s outrage into public proof.

Before push notifications, Boston had broadsides, single sheets that could turn rumor into rendezvous and outrage into action. If the Sons of Liberty wanted the truth to travel, they didn’t whisper it. They printed it.

A hand-printed call to meet under the Liberty Tree at noon

This broadside, dated Tuesday morning, December 17, 1765, summons the “True-born Sons of Liberty” to gather under LIBERTY-TREE at XII o’Clock to hear, under oath, whether Andrew Oliver had truly resigned as stamp distributor. Not a private promise. A public statement, staged in daylight, with witnesses.

Behind it is the organizing instinct of the Loyal Nine, an early core that helped shape what became the Sons of Liberty. They understood something timeless: movements run on coordination and credibility. If Oliver resigned, Boston needed more than “someone said.” It needed proof the whole town could share.

One of the best details is the headline’s rhythmic snarl: “St—p! … No:” and then the verdict at the bottom: “A Resignation? YES.” It reads like a chant and a receipt. The broadside isn’t just information; it’s confirmation.

 Under the Liberty Tree: reading, signing, treating a printed sheet as evidence.

At the bottom sits a quiet credit: Edes & Gill, because printers weren’t background characters. They were infrastructure. They made ideas portable, repeatable, and hard to erase. This is the Revolution before muskets: paper, witnesses, and a town insisting on reality together. 

General Thomas Gage: A Man Trying to Hold a City and Himself Together

In Broadside, General Thomas Gage isn’t a cartoon tyrant, he’s a career officer and administrator who believes order is mercy. He arrives in Boston thinking he can manage unrest with discipline, procedure, and a steady hand. His goal is simple: keep the city quiet. No riots, no bloodshed, no humiliation that forces London’s hand, but Boston is a living printing press. The war begins as a war of words, and Gage is outpaced by rumor, satire, songs, and broadsides. Every proclamation he issues becomes material for the Patriots to reshape and distribute. He didn’t come to be the villain, but the city keeps casting him as one and the harder he tries to control the narrative, the more he feeds it.

Thomas Gage at home with his family

His greatest vulnerability is personal. Gage’s marriage to Margaret ties him to the colonies in a way his uniform can’t erase. At home, he wants peace and privacy; in public, he’s tasked with control. He guards information, tightens his circle, and convinces himself that secrecy is protection, until he realizes that the conflict has entered his house as well as his streets. Gage’s arc is pressure-cooker tragedy: measured restraint becomes tightening authority, which becomes paranoia, which becomes rupture. He grows harsher not out of cruelty, but out of fear, fear of disorder, fear of being outmaneuvered, fear of losing the one life he thought he could keep separate. By the time the plans leak and events accelerate toward violence, he understands the trap: soldiers can hold streets, but they can’t hold a story once it starts moving.

Thomas Gage, upset after reading the Boston Gazette

For an actor, Gage is compelling because he’s intelligent enough to see what’s happening and trapped enough that he can’t stop it. Play him as controlled, not cruel. Let the strain show in the cracks: clipped words, tightened posture, a man trying to keep peace who slowly realizes he’s authoring war.

Margaret Gage: A Colonial Daughter, a General’s Wife, an Impossible Choice

Margaret Gage is the quiet storm at the center of Broadside, a woman living inside two loyalties at once. In public, she is Lady Gage, the composed wife of General Thomas Gage, moving through British command with practiced grace. But she was born in the colonies, and that identity never leaves her, no matter how carefully she’s learned to live inside the Crown’s world.

Margaret Gage, a general's wife, colonial daughter, an impossible choice

What she wants is almost painfully simple: a family, a home, a life that isn’t all strategy and consequence. She sees that “normal life” reflected in Paul Revere, an artisan with ink-stained hands, rooted in work and community, building something real each day. In Margaret’s eyes, Paul and the Patriot cause aren’t just rebellion; they’re the possibility of a future that feels like home.

A life in the spot light, or one of family simplicity?

And yet she does love her husband and aristocratic life. Thomas Gage isn’t a villain in her heart, he’s her partner, complicated and human, carrying his own burdens. Their marriage in Broadside holds real tenderness alongside the tension: two people trying to stay connected while history yanks them toward opposite sides of the room.

Margaret and Thomas settled with their family in London

That’s why her turning point lands: when she learns the British plans for Concord, she can’t pretend it’s only politics, it’s lives. She gets word to Joseph Warren, and she does it in the most Margaret way possible: quietly, bravely, hidden in her corset and passed through Paul Revere. It’s not a loud betrayal, it’s a small, devastating act of conscience from someone who loves deeply, and still chooses to warn the people she can’t stop belonging to.

TEA, Destroyed by Indians.

There’s something wonderfully Boston about turning a political flashpoint into a song you can carry in your pocket. “TEA, Destroyed by Indians.” isn’t a dry report, it’s a song-sheet broadside, the kind you’d tack up, pass along, or read aloud where people actually gathered: print shops, doorways, and taverns. Printed on a traditional press at the Edes & Gill Printing Office (hand-set in Caslon type, just like the period), it’s a reminder that revolutionary news didn’t only move by speeches and letters, it moved by rhythm, repetition, and a chorus that sticks.

“TEA, Destroyed by Indians” A hand-printed broadside from Edes & Gill

The lyrics do exactly what broadsides did best: they frame the story and tell you how to feel about it. The headline names “Indians,” nodding to the disguise used on the night of December 16, 1773, less an ethnographic claim than a theatrical mask, a symbolic break from British identity. The song celebrates the act as courage, ties it to liberty, and leans hard into community energy: a call to keep going, keep resisting, keep your backbone straight. You can almost hear the hook in the repeated chorus, designed for groups, not soloists, because the point wasn’t just to inform the public; it was to activate it.

Colonists coming together to sing the new broadside at a local tavern.

That’s why this broadside is such a delight to hold and read today: it’s basically Revolutionary-era “shareable media.” The little ship vignette at the top sets the scene, the bold typography pulls you in, and the verses do the persuasive work, turning a complicated dispute over taxes, cargo, and authority into a story with heroes, stakes, and a singalong refrain. In other words: Boston didn’t merely witness history; it printed it, performed it, and made sure the whole town could hum the message on the way home.