It’s not often you hear John Adams sing “God Save the King.” In fact it’s quite hard to imagine, and yet it happened; the second president of the United States even accompanied himself on a Casio keyboard. That moment of recollected childhood patriotism (without the keyboard) occur red when the young Adams was in a crowd of Massachusetts onlookers about 1755. They were all stirred to song by a passing detachment of British redcoats who were marching their way through Braintree on the way to protect Canada during the French and Indian War. It was recreated on a bright Sunday afternoon at the Pardee-Morris House on the East Shore as part of the New Haven Museum’s ongoing celebrations of our 250th shout-out for American history and democracy. Sunday’s John Adams was Fairfield-based lawyer George Baker, who has been reenacting John Adams since about 2008. He has brought his one-man show to performances at venues including the presidential libraries of Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and George H.W. Bush. On Sunday the viewers were a lucky audience of almost a hundred cap-and-sunglasses wearing folks relaxing on lawn chairs on the grass and sated, too, after having consumed a performance (by Robert Lecce), along with some samples of chocolate as it might have been produced in Connecticut in the 1770s. While the colonial chocolatier had been wearing his tri-corner hat for his show, Baker opted to be hatless. However he wore owly wire-rimmed spectacles perched far down his nose, a convincing frock coat and white cravat, knee-length breeches, and buckled leather shoes. Moving effortlessly in and out of character, and peppering his patter with a kind of colonial version of Borscht Belt (“You’ve seen the Washington Monument, right? Looks nothing like him! . . . My father [Deacon John Adams] wanted me to go to the local community college; (hold a beat) it was called Harvard). Over an hour or so Baker performed a charm bracelet of entertaining and informative vignettes. They went a long way to revealing the fun and the flaws and the particular humanity of the extraordinarily busy Number Two Founding Father. A longtime lawyer retired only a few years, why and how had Baker also found time to create a solo show, complete with tunes, wit, and colonial patter centered on the life of the second president? “I just loved being an actor” in college and community theater, Baker replied as he readied himself for the show. Although he had become a lawyer, he came to realize “I was happiest on stage.” He had to have theater in his life, “but the runs were too brief.” So he began searching for a solo show subject he could do whenever, all year long if he wished. And here, Baker said, his wife enters the origin story as she was critical to the decision (as Abigail Adams often was in the life of John) and it was because Baker’s wife had just finished reading John Adams, David McCullough’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2001 biography. “You could be him,” she urged her husband, So Baker began reading, he said, absolutely everything he could find about both John and Abigail Adams and their world. “I wanted to find a person who was me,” Baker said. And when he began the show, as well as when he finished, he’d accomplished being Adams as well as himself, and both at the same time. That’s hard to do, and it’s also a mystery. “I was proud to be an Englishman,” Baker said, when he stepped up to his speaking platform Sunday, tuned his keyboard, and had become Adams. “We started every meeting with ‘God Save the King.’ You all know it. Let me play a few bars.” Slipping easily in and out of his character, Baker did exactly that. The tune finished, he resumed the life of Adams: “Time came when the king was the last person we wanted to save!” The Adams parents wanted him to go to Harvard to be a clergyman. He wanted to be a lawyer. “But that was a profession several tiers, at the time, below a minister.” So they compromised and Adams began his adult career, for a few years, working as what we would today call a middle school teacher. “Teaching, however, taught me to persuasive,” said Baker/Adams. “Because if you can teach a 13-year-old boy to do something, well, you can persuade a Continental Congress 20 years later.” When he broke the parental bond and finally did apprentice himself to the law and became a lawyer, Adams began his practice in what Baker termed one of the largest cities in America at the time: Boston, population 15,000. “These days, I’m told, Boston has about 15,000 lawyers.” (Apparently lawyers are allowed to tell as many lawyer jokes as they can fit in.) Perhaps it’s because of that lawyer-to-lawyer connection across time, however, that Baker’s detailed re-telling/reenactment of Adams’ defense of the eight British soldiers accused of murdering five colonials at the Boston Massacre was the most moving aspect of his performance. Here are some Baker/Adams excerpts that evoke the intimacy, passion, and scariness of that moment, the cold, icy, snowy night, March 5, 1770, around 9:00 p.m. “when some 500 people came closer and closer to a tiny group of soldiers. “Shots were fired, and six were dead. I was asked to represent them as defense counsel, even though I knew I’d be hated by my clients. “Abigail said to me, ‘You mean your former clients.’ “But I wanted Boston to be known as a place where we were living by rule of law. This was an obvious self-defense argument” — that is, the soldiers were being threatened, of being trampled, in fear of their own lives. “I had to explain why we made it so difficult to convict, to find guilt. I had to explain why it was more important to protect the innocent than to convict the guilty. “That trial was the first time the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ rule for conviction was used. And that’s the basis of due process down to today. “I got all but two off from the murder charge, and those two were convicted of manslaughter. The judge said he wouldn’t sentence right away, but the next morning. “He said he wanted counsel to be aware of an ancient law that benefited clergy. This was a hint from the judge to help our clients. There it was. “By which the judge meant,” Baker explained, slipping into the present moment, that a medieval loophole existed that if first-time offenders happened to be members of the clergy, in some fashion, they would be exempted from the most serious punishment. “So that evening,” Baker resumed as Adams, “we visited the soldiers in their cell. I asked, “Do you know psalms?] ‘I was an altar boy and I know Psalm 23,’ was his answer. The other said, ‘I haven’t been to church in my life.’ I left him my Bible and told him to read. “On the next day before the judge sentenced, he called counsel to the bench. I said, ‘I’ll prove these two are clergymen! Everyone laughed. I said, ‘Judge, you did it to yourself.] “They both recited [Psalm 23],” although the second soldier, who, they later learned, was completely illiterate, had a halting time of it. “’I will find these two are clergymen,’ the judge said, ‘and they will be taken out and their thumbs branded “M” for manslaughter. I had gotten them all off. “I found that the people of Boston appreciated that when a capital offense is against someone, they need a competent lawyer.” Baker/Adams went on to other subjects — how, for example, no, he did not drink the beer produced by his far more radical cousin, Sam Adams, an organizer of the Boston Tea Party. “No, hard cider is my favorite. I drink it every morning, and though Abigail objects, I tell her it’s good for my mood and my digestion.” Adams didn’t take any more credit than he deserved for the many accomplishments he tallied in his increasingly public life. He recalled the pride of being the chair of the committee to write the Declaration of Independence, but, yes, it was Jefferson who did most of the work. “Franklin and I made suggestions.” Baker also time-travels you via two other performances he offers — one titled “Abigail Adams, America’s First Modern Woman, as Told by Her Husband” — and also “Adams and Jefferson — A 50 Year Friendship.” Here’s his site, where, if you click on the video below the photo of Adams/Baker, there’s a four-minute video clip with other highlights. The post John Adams Reenactor Finds The Humor In The Revolution appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less