The year was 1976. Memories of Nixon and Watergate fouled the air. Leonard Bernstein, idealistic to a fault, seized the moment to create a labour of conspicuous love and troubled patriotism for Broadway. His partner in radically chic compulsion was Alan Jay Lerner, whose cumbersome book traced presidential politics and racism throughout US history.

The result, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue , was an elephantine mishmash, sometimes solemnly operatic and often shamelessly showbizzy. It closed after seven performances. Bernstein never wrote another musical. That, it was thought, was that.