New York audiences will be able to hear a lot of Leonard Bernstein’s music this year, which would have been his 90th birthday. Carnegie Hall and the New York Philharmonic are co-producing a Bernstein festival this fall. Next month, New York City Opera is bringing back its Harold Prince-directed production of “Candide.”

But for those eager to get an earlier start, on March 31 the Collegiate Chorale is performing part of the score of a musical about American politics that Bernstein wrote with book writer Alan Jay Lerner. Called “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” the show hasn’t been performed in New York since 1976, when it closed on Broadway after only a week.

While praising the rich and varied score, critics panned “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” for its messy structure and its stark — some said preachy — depiction of race relations in American history. Bernstein and Lerner didn’t allow a cast recording to be made, nor did they license a revival in their lifetimes. After Bernstein’s death in 1990, his estate assembled a 90-minute concert version, called “A White House Cantata,” which is the work the Collegiate Chorale will perform.

How two such masters of musical theater could produce a major flop is a story in itself. Lerner originally had the idea to write a musical about presidential politics after the Watergate break-in in 1972. According to a 1992 article in the magazine Show Music by Erik Haagensen — who directed the only revival of “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” at Indiana University — Lerner approached Bernstein, and Bernstein asked him for an outline. In it, Lerner conceived of a plot that would depict crucial moments in history when the White House was threatened, including the British attack on Washington in 1814, the Civil War, and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. The main characters would be the presidents and first ladies, all of whom would be played by the same two actors, along with several generations of a dynasty of White House servants, also played by one pair of actors — who would, significantly, be black.

The generations of servants “are a stand-in for the American people,” Mr. Haagensen wrote in his article. “Eventually [the youngest generation] considers abandoning the White House (again, read American democracy), disillusioned by the succession of attempts on it and the behavior of some of the men in it.”

As the writing proceeded, Lerner and Bernstein added a second, framing plot, in which the actors broke out of the historical scenes and became contemporary actors rehearsing a play about the White House and having their own arguments about politics and race.

The show was structurally problematic, and Lerner and Bernstein kept making changes. After the show was slammed by critics in its try-out in Philadelphia, they removed almost all of the rehearsal frame, stripping it of much of its philosophical underpinning. “It went through agonizing contortions on its way to Broadway,” Bernstein’s daughter, Jamie Bernstein, said in an interview. “The music is gorgeous, but the book had a lot of problems.”

The most violent responses seem to have been to the show’s emphasis on race. “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” was perhaps not well-served by having received major backing from Coca-Cola in honor of the nation’s bicentennial. Audiences expected a feel-good celebration of America; what they got was much heavier.

The theater critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, William Collins, wrote that the show’s viewpoint “is one which a black historian might take in laying out the record of denial of equal rights. It is a narrow view, a slant rather than a dramatic theme, a position rather than a passion, written with a smugly right-minded, fashionably cynical attitude of a white liberal on a guilt trip.” An anonymous critic scrawled on a program from the Philadelphia production: “Worst musical ever. Boring. Long.” And then: “TOO RACIAL!”

“It was maybe ahead of its time,” Ms. Bernstein said. The show, she acknowledged, had “a built-in problem: Two white Jewish guys were talking about [race]. That automatically put people’s hackles up.”

After Bernstein’s death, his estate hired Mr. Haagensen to try to reconstruct “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” as it was before the show left for Philadelphia, when the cast did what is known as a “gypsy” run-through for other theater professionals in New York. That performance was well-received, and the estate wanted to know if that version could be more successful. Mr. Haagensen directed a production at Indiana University in 1992; the production then traveled to the Kennedy Center in Washington.

“We were trying to see if it was worth saving,” the vice president of public relations at the Leonard Bernstein Office, Craig Urquhart, said. Ultimately, they decided it wasn’t, but they went ahead with developing the concert version.

The music director of the Collegiate Chorale, Robert Bass, said he selected “A White House Cantata,” because he was looking for something unusual to perform in honor of Bernstein’s birthday. The music is “very exuberant and has this pastiche of American styles, like calypso, minstrel music, jazz, waltzes, and anthems,” Mr. Bass said. (One song, “Take Care of This House,” became a hit outside of the show, and was sung at President Carter’s inaugural gala in January 1977.)

The concert is being directed by Roger Rees. Mr. Rees and Mr. Bass decided not to change any of the lyrics, although some of the characters utter racial slurs, including “darkies,” and worse. The performance will be introduced by the actor and radio host Seth Rudetsky, and there will be a post-concert discussion with members of the original cast.

Mr. Bass noted that the show’s themes are particularly relevant in this election year. Ms. Bernstein said that her father “believed that slavery and the injustice toward the blacks was the essential core of the American experience. [He] would have been so excited about Barack Obama if he were alive now.”

Performance on March 31 (Frederick P. Rose Theater, Time Warner Center, Broadway at 60th Street, 646-792-2373).