Hermione Hoby

Whitaker must make sure that, unlike Eerie's audience of the lone night clerk (played by Frank Wood, perfecting an eyes-open narcolepsy), we are not bored to stupefaction. Instead, he must be sufficiently magnetic and compelling in his patter that we, the real audience, never want him to shut up...Also, the grandstanding here has to be the opposite kind of Amin's: that of a man who, deep down, knows he holds next to no power. Accordingly, Whitaker imbues Eerie's showboating with impressive understatement...it's curious that Grandage would have chosen to intersperse the play with several heavy-handed interludes in which the lights intensify, the spooky music swells and the clerk's stare becomes even more eerily vacant. Perhaps these moments are simply there for Whitaker to catch his breath.

Michelle Williams, an enormously gifted screen actress, is making her Broadway debut with this role. Doll-like in her blonde bob, she's more girlish than fatale, playing it with an unsteady, skittish desperation and a plummy, naughty accent that seems directly modelled on Renee Zellwegger's Bridget Jones. No bad thing, but occasionally it slips and falters and, like the accent, the spoken parts of her performance sometimes feel wobbly. She becomes more and more compelling, however, as the show goes on, singing and dancing with a furious, madcap quality and by the time she delivers the title number she's at the height of her power...Alan Cumming, made up like an Otto Dix painting, is perfect as the delicious and depraved Master of Ceremonies and he sets the tone for a show that's as riotously risqué as it is ultimately ruthless.

The play might be a star vehicle but its star delivers. It's thrilling to watch Cranston go from his default, comic stance of forward-thrust hips and slumped shoulders, to fearsome, chest-puffed, confrontation. The play charts Johnson's first year in office and the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, taking LBJ from 'accidental president' (he took over after the killing of John F Kennedy) to elected man of the people, with meticulous fidelity. And this is the problem: so often it seems more like a putatively objective history lesson than an examination of character and compromise.