Robert Schenkkan’s All the Way, now on Broadway at the Neil Simon Theater, tells of Lyndon Johnson’s fight, in his first year in office, to get America’s first civil rights bill through congress. The play boasts a large, excellent cast, many of them familiar on Broadway, including Michael McKean as Hoover, John McMartin as Senator Richard Russell, and Brandon J. Dirden as Martin Luther King, and a flexible cast playing multiple roles (congresspeople, Washington officials, black activists).
On the night I attended, Bryan Cranston was greeted by an enthusiastic audience of his TV fans, and he made for a powerful Johnson, commanding the stage with his voice and persona as a smart, crude, crafty and powerful politician.
All the Way takes three hours to untangle the intricacies of political gamesmanship and compromise played out between Southerners (except Johnson) who want to kill the bill and liberals who want this landmark law, set in motion by John F. Kennedy, to pass.
Director Bill Rauch stages it all beautifully on Christopher Acebo’s imaginative set, with Jane Cox’s superb lighting.
The play could be trimmed without losing anything, and too much of the acting is declaiming – even in conversation – but as an event, it holds you. History! — dreamers and schemers running things in Washington at a time of great change.
