I knew little about Andrew Jackson, our seventh President, when I entered the Jacobs Theatre on Broadway at an Actors’ Fund Benefit performance this past week.  When I left, I knew quite a lot, but it certainly wasn’t presented to me in the ways of the old schoolhouse I knew as a kid taking my grade school history course.   No, Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman have taken into their minds a kind of Li’l Abner musical using Andy Jackson as the Tennessee hillbilly whose sad beginnings included the loss of his mother and father when he was 13. He ran off and became what would later be known as a “self made man”, rising all the way through odd jobs, then  law school,  before becoming a Major General in the War of 1812 and a two-term president from 1829-1837. [Read more...]