From the greats like Washington and Lincoln to the murkier Nixons and Clintons, music has added spice to the White House.

1776 (Sherman Edwards)

With music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards and a book by Peter Stone, 1776 features no less than three American presidents – the 1st (George Washington), 2nd (John Adams) and 3rd (Thomas Jefferson). The story tells how the Declaration of Independence came to be signed and focuses on the efforts of the irascible patriot Adams to persuade his colleagues to vote ‘yes’.

The show is set at sessions of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, the oppressive heat and “too many flies” a constant refrain. Adams complaint that all Congress does is “piddle, twiddle, and resolve”, and many of the lines given to other Founding Fathers like the avuncular Ben Franklin are based on letters and reported speech. Unlike the musical Hamilton, where Jefferson – the author of the famous document – is shown as the political operative he truly was, 1776 portrays him as a violin-playing romantic whose sex-drive is occasionally comically remarked upon. Washington is heard but not seen, his gloomy dispatches punctuating the action as the tension ratchets.

The genius of the piece is the way the known outcome seems to hang in the balance, before the inevitable North-South compromise over the issue of slavery. Although the musical won three 1969 Tony Awards, including for Best Musical, Sherman, who died in 1981, never wrote another show.

^{Photo: Jarrod Zimmerman (Edward Rutledge) and the cast of the West Coast premiere of Tony Award-winning director Frank Galati’s staging of 1776. Photo by Kevin Berne.}

Hamilton (Lin-Manuel Miranda)

Hamilton: An American Musical is that rare beast, a work that introduces fans of hip-hop and popular culture to 18th-century US political history and fiscal policy. Sound dry? Not a bit. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 musical about the life of Founding Father Alexander was inspired by the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow and its cast list includes the first four presidents of the United States: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in key roles.

Born of Scottish descent in the former British West Indies, Hamilton came to America in time to fight in the War of Independence before becoming Washington’s right-hand man, a crucial voice at the Constitutional Convention, and ultimately the first Secretary of the Treasury. He was killed in a duel in 1804 by Vice President Aaron Burr, and the musical parallels the two men’s careers and the political machinations that led up to Hamilton’s untimely death.

Championing Hamilton as a successful immigrant, Miranda’s multi-ethnic cast caused a stir at a time when Republican political rhetoric was stigmatising overseas workers as a drain on the US economy. In 2016, Hamilton received a record 16 Tony nominations, carrying off 11, including Best Musical, as well as winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (Michael Friedman)

In the raucous, rollicking rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, composer/lyricist Michael Friedman presents the seventh President of the United States, as a cocky emo rock star in tight jeans and eyeliner.

Andrew Jackson governed for eight years from 1829. Nicknamed Old Hickory for his aggressive, no-bullshit style, he was a divisive figure who drove the British and Spanish out of the US, forcibly relocated the Native American Indians (massacring those who refused), took on the banks and positioned himself as a man of the people, forming the Democratic Party.

With a clever, darkly satiric book by Alex Timbers, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson charts his tough childhood in the Tennessee Hills, his military exploits and his move into politics, as well as his close relationship with wife Rachel. Combining folksy scenes, irreverent sketch comedy and political satire, the 90-minute show hurtles along poking fun at narrative storytelling and American conservatism as it puts the boot into ruthless politicking, portraying Jackson as a rocking but seriously flawed maverick with lashings of charisma.

The snarky rock score ranges from the rousing Populism, Yea, Yea! to a dark take on the nursery rhyme Ten Little Indians. Was he America’s greatest president or an “American Hitler”? asks the musical. Cast your own vote.

Lincoln Portrait (Aaron Copland)

Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican President of the United States of America. During his term as president – before he was assassinated in 1865 – he led the United States through the Civil War and abolished slavery and his Gettysburg Address has become one of the famous speeches of history.

It was to Lincoln that Aaron Copland turned when, during World War II, conductor Andre Kostelanetz asked him to write a musical portrait of a great American figure. Copland’s iconic “open plains” American orchestral sound is interspersed with dialogue about Lincoln’s life and legacy, as well as excerpts from the President’s speeches and letters. Copland also quotes material from folk songs of Lincoln’s day, including Camptown Races and The Pesky Serpent (better known now as Springfield Mountain). As Copland wrote in his own note for the piece, “In neither case is the treatment a literal one. The tunes are used freely, in the manner of my use of cowboy songs in Billy the Kid.”

Famous narrators have included Neil Armstrong, Katharine Hepburn, Samuel L. Jackson and Margaret Thatcher. General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the coalition forces in the Gulf War, recorded Lincoln Portrait with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1992. Several US Presidents have also stood in for Lincoln, with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both narrating the work at different times.

Assassins (Stephen Sondheim)

Opening at a fairground shooting gallery (“Shoot the President – Win a Prize”),

Stephen Sondheim’s darkly comic, deeply political, revue-style musical Assassins with book by John Weidman, gets into the messed-up heads of nine men and women who attempted to assassinate presidents across a century of American history, four of them successfully.

Only three of the presidents – James Garfield, William McKinley and Gerald Ford –  actually appear, though would-be assassin John Hinkley Jr (the obsessive stalker of Jodie Foster) is seen firing shots at a picture of Ronald Reagan. The others targeted – Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon –  are an off-stage presence. The assassins, meanwhile, range from lost souls to political firebrands, among them John Wilkes Booth who killed Abraham Lincoln and Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of John F. Kennedy.

Premiering off-Broadway in 1990, the 2004 Broadway production won five Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Musical. Sondheim’s ironically jaunty score includes pastiches of marching bands, show tunes, folk songs and pop ballads, among them the upbeat opening number Everybody’s Got the Right, the chilling Gun Song (performed by Leon Czolgosz who shot President McKinley) and the disturbingly beautiful Unworthy of Your Love, a duet between Hinckley and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a follower of the psychopathic Charles Manson.

Annie (Charles Strouse)

The 32nd President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt – in office from 1933 until his death in 1945, winning a record four Presidential elections – appears as a character in Charles Strouse’s incredibly successful Annie. Based on the Harold Gray comic strip Little Orphan Annie, the Award-winning musical, with lyrics by Martin Charnin and a book by Thomas Meehan, features hit songs Tomorrow and It’s the Hard Knock Life.

After going to stay with billionaire Oliver Warbucks, the plucky depression-era orphan meets the president on a trip to Washington DC. She starts to sing Tomorrow but is silenced by the cabinet. FDR, however, is charmed by her optimism and forces his cabinet to sing along, Annie changing the course of US history. The President winds up helping to find the identity of Annie’s parents and Annie’s optimistic attitude influences the President’s economic policy. The musical’s finale is A New Deal for Christmas – ushering in a bright future for Annie, who is adopted by Warbucks, and a bright future for the USA, which is set for rosier economic times with Roosevelt’s New Deal policies.

Jackie O (Michael Daugherty)

Herbert Howells wrote Take him earth for cherishing for his funeral, and the impact of his assassination stops shows from Caroline, or Change to Malcom X, the opera, but so overwhelming was the death of President John F Kennedy that it seems to have deterred writers from portraying him directly on the stage. However, the American composer Michael Daugherty took on two sacred cows in one when he wrote his chamber opera Jackie O to a libretto by Wayne Koestenbaum in 1997.

With a mix of pop art tunefulness and operatic pastiche, the work looks at the return of Jackie Kennedy to society in 1968 and her wooing by Greek oil tycoon Aristotle Onassis. JFK appears in the final scene as a ‘dream vision’, his disembodied high tenor effectively granting his widow permission to move on. Thus liberated, she sings Kennedy’s legendary “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” as a spunky Dylanesque ditty.

The show – that even manages to cram in Andy Warhol and Maria Callas! – received a critical pasting in some quarters when first staged at Houston Grand Opera, but since has caught on, particularly with high schools and music colleges.

Nixon In China (John Adams)

The first opera to put a US president front and centre was John Adams’ Nixon in China. The three act post-Minimalist epic to a libretto by Alice Goodman was inspired by the diplomatic visit of President Richard Nixon to China in 1972. Adams initially laughed off the proposal pitched to him by iconoclastic director Peter Sellars, but changed his mind as the idea took shape.

Utilising a large orchestra, including synthesisers and saxophones, the opera captures the emotional grand designs of the President and his party – including his wife Pat and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. With catchy rhythms and memorable tunes, the opera riffs on the idea of the political hero and includes roles for the ageing Chairman Mao, his fourth wife (a coloratura who sings the fiendish aria I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung), and the Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-Lai.

Among the score’s hits are the onstage landing of the presidential Boeing (no mean feat to pull off), Pat Nixon’s radiant aria as she sightsees at The Great Wall, and the moment when the overwrought Nixons step into a performance of a Communist ballet to save the heroine from rape by a brutal overseer (cleverly doubled with Kissinger). The score also contextualises Adams’ orchestral work The Chairman Dances, where Mao steps down from a poster to dance a touching foxtrot with his wife.

Clinton: The Musical (Paul Hodge)

In Clinton: The Musical there are not one but two Bill Clintons, with two actors playing the contradictory sides of the 42nd President of the United States. Thus we have WJ, the charismatic, honourable statesman, and Billy, his pot-smoking, sax-playing, randy alter-ego. Only his wife Hillary can see both. Other characters wonder if he’s losing it as he argues with himself.

With music and lyrics by Australian Paul Hodge, who also co-wrote the book with his brother Michael Hodge, the brash, cheerily ribald musical had a four-month season off-Broadway in 2015. In September 2016, it made its Australian premiere at Perth’s Black Swan State Theatre Company.

The show follows William Jefferson Clinton through his turbulent career as President (1993 – 2001), including his impeachment (and subsequent acquittal) for lying about his “sexual relations” with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The musical is as much about Hillary, who is portrayed as the ambitious power behind the throne. Donald Trump, her rival presidential candidate in the current election, also puts in an appearance.

The tongue-in-cheek songs have a cabaret feel, with Hodge taking lots of inspiration from the 1990s, while Lewinsky gets to belt out the unforgettable refrain “I’m fucking the fucking President” in Monica’s Song.

Total Political Correctness (Robert Davidson)

Appropriately for this election, Robert Davidson has set the words of Republican Nominee Donald Trump in his 2015 work, Total Political Correctness. The Australian composer doesn’t shy away from politics in his music, his Not Now, Not Ever! set former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s famous Misogyny speech to music.

In Total Political Correctness, Davidson sets the speech of both Trump and Fox News journalist Megyn Kelly to music, using audio samples from television coverage. Moderating the first Republican debate, Kelly began a question, “One of the things people love about you is you speak your mind,” before going on to list various derogatory ways in which the US Presidential hopeful has referred to women in the past – using the words “dogs”, “slobs”, “disgusting animals” and so on.

The title of the work comes from Trumps defence, “I have been challenged by so many people and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness,” which Davidson jumps on as a spiky motif in the work, the choir repeating the harsh syllables. Davidson’s work has been recorded by The Australian Voices on their 2016 album Reverie. While the pieces explores the alarming rhetoric used by Trump over the course of his Presidential, Total Political Correctness is as playful as it is cutting. As Trump himself says, “It’s fun, it’s kidding, we have a good time.”