Broadsides, Broadsides, Everywhere Broadsides!

If you’re writing a musical about Boston in the 1770s, you’re basically swimming in Broadsides. They were the social media of the Revolution: one sheet of paper, ink still tacky from the press, slapped onto tavern walls, meeting house doors, and convenient fence posts. News, satire, song lyrics, if it needed to be seen or sung, it went on a broadside. So of course, in Broadside, they’re everywhere.

Dr Joseph Warren hands out Broadsides of the Liberty Song

Opening the show with a song sheet.

In our opening scene at Faneuil Hall, Dr. Joseph Warren doesn’t just give a speech, he hands history out, one sheet at a time. He moves through the crowd of uneasy colonists, passing out fresh-inked copies of “The Liberty Song.” The hall is full of men who’ve been reading angry essays for years, but this is different. This is something they can sing. At first the colonists only mouth the words, sounding out the rhythm from the page. A few lines later, a melody catches, someone dares to sing out, another joins, and the harmony slowly gathers. By the end of the number, the whole hall is on its feet, they all start singing “The Liberty Song” together, the broadside in their hands turning into a shared anthem. It’s a quiet revolution: not muskets, not marches, just verses and a melody, printed in black and white. The colonists study the notes, lift their voices, and you can feel the room shift. The broadside becomes a kind of permission slip to raise their voices together.

General Gage tears up Paul Revere's Broadside "A Warm Place—Hell"

When the broadside bites back.

Later in the scene the mood has changed. This time it’s General Thomas Gage holding a sheet of paper, and it’s not a hopeful new anthem. It’s one of Paul Revere’s most vicious broadsides: “A Warm Place – Hell,” with its devil driving Boston’s “rescinders” straight into the jaws of a monstrous sea creature. Gage treats it almost like a prop in a dark comedy. He holds it up for the crowd, Loyalists chuckling behind him, Patriots watching tightly from the benches and reads it like an absurd review of his own administration. Then he shrugs and says: “I daresay we’ve all been living in our own kind of hell these past months. Perhaps it’s time…” (he tears the sheets neatly in two) “…to let your neighbors up and out.” It’s a chilling moment because he’s not just tearing paper. He’s trying to tear up the story the Patriots are telling about his loyalist party.