All the Way is a gripping new play about a pivotal moment in American history. This drama will take audiences behind the doors of the Oval Office and inside the first years of Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency, and his fight to pass a landmark civil rights bill. Bryan Cranston, Michael McKean and Brandon J. Dirden will be joined by an ensemble cast playing additional roles such as Hubert Humphrey, Richard Russell, Robert McNamara, Coretta Scott King, Lady Bird Johnson, Bob Moses, Roy Wilkins, Lurleen Wallace, Stokely Carmichael, Walter Jenkins, Stanley Levison, George Wallace, Ralph Abernathy and Judge Smith.
All the Way was commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's American Revolutions: the United States History Cycle and premiered at OSF in 2012. It then went on to play a sold-out and critically acclaimed run at the A.R.T. from September 13-October 12, 2013 starring Cranston. The play was awarded the 2013 inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, established through Columbia University in honor of the late Senator Kennedy, honoring new plays or musicals exploring US history and issues of the day.
Cranston doesn't look or act much like the real LBJ (at least the one most of us saw on TV), and that's one of the more intriguing aspects of Bill Rauch's direction. Except for a dead-on Lady Bird Johnson (Betsy Aidem) and George Wallace (Rob Campbell), the cast avoids the Madame Tussauds approach to acting that has taken over biopics (and rarely fails to win actors their Oscars). Rauch keeps the focus on telling a complicated story as nimbly as possible, dispensing with the extreme makeup and mannerisms that would only get in the way as Brandon J. Dirden's MLK, Christopher Gurr's Strom Thurmond, Richard Poe's Everett Dirksen, William Jackson Harper's Stokely Carmichael, Robert Petkoff's Hubert Humphrey, Michael McKean's J. Edgar Hoover and Cranston's LBJ do battle with each other in 1964.
Bryan Cranston recently ended five seasons playing a good man surrounded by depraved criminals, drowning by inches in a cesspool of guilt, paranoia and homicidal rage. In other words, he was training to be President of the United States. As Lyndon B. Johnson, borne into the Oval Office on a wave of blood and hemmed in by enemies within and without his party, Cranston rules the boards with a vengeance, a latter-day Abe Lincoln who drops f-bombs and talks plenty about balls. The TV star's galvanic turn and the layered, polyphonic production around him take the dried facts of history and make them walk, talk and kick ass to victory...Director Bill Rauch keeps the action flowing through Schenkkan's lively use of direct address, split scenes, soliloquy and fourth-wall-breaking exhortation. This being a political potboiler, there's plenty of rousing rhetoric, and Cranston imbues his inspiring speeches and profane rants with a larger-than-life intensity that leaps off the page. Even if the script sometimes lapses into History Channel expositional mode, its humor and passion never lag-and neither does Cranston.
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