When Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner announced that they were collaborating on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a new Broadway musical about the first century of life in the White House, critics and audiences eagerly anticipated a patriotic extravaganza to celebrate the bicentennial year of 1976. When the Coca-Cola Corporation announced its full sponsorship of the musical, expectations climbed even higher. As one reporter put it, “With two such fertile minds as these working together, the prospects of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue being a big hit are good indeed.” Optimism pervaded the project. The producer Roger L. Stevens told reporters, “I think it will be the great musical of the decade.” To this, Bernstein responded, “If you’re going to be a proud producer, Roger, you might as well say ‘of the century.’” Despite all the anticipation, when the musical opened for tryouts in Philadelphia on February 26, 1976, it disappointed and angered audiences and received nearly unanimously negative reviews. Before its next round of tryouts at the National Theatre in Washington, DC, Lerner and Bernstein worked desperately to salvage the show, but despite all their tireless revisions and the eff orts of a new director and choreographer, by the time 1600 made it to Broadway, it was unanimously dismissed as a “tremendous flop.” The company gave only seven official performances at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on Broadway, May 4–8, 1976, before the show closed, losing its entire investment. Bernstein and Lerner, who expressed great disappointment in their failure, withdrew the work from their catalogs, and it was not performed again until after both of them had died.

Critics in 1976 agreed that 1600 failed largely because of its incoherent narrative and bitter tone. Many praised Bernstein's score, but they found the show as a whole confusing and heavy-handed, pointing to Lerner's book as the main problem. It lacked logical dramatic flow and sagged under the weight of trying to comment on too many social issues without inspiring enough emotional involvement with the characters. Rather than providing an uplifting musical history of the American presidency, it preached relentlessly on racial inequality and political hypocrisy.