From: NY Daily News
By: Joe Dziemianowicz
Date: 2014-03-06
6 / 10
Hot off a prize-winning streak on 'Breaking Bad,' Bryan Cranston drives this star vehicle covering LBJ's turbulent first year in the top job with an uncanny authority and confidence rare in first time Broadway performers. The actor is at the height of his power playing a commander-in-chief striving to harness his own. Cranston, who turns 58 Friday, is fiery, ferocious, scary and, quite often very funny as the President who struggles in 1964 to validate his 'accidental' rise while also ensuring re-election. Getting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is key to achieving both - but the clock is ticking and the ranks of opponents are growing...It's also longwinded as it checks off 1964 talking points - MLK's infidelity, FBI spying, three young men killed in Mississippi, Democratic National Convention gamesmanship and more. But when it's at its best, 'All the Way' shows the wide division between parties and players in D.C. then - and now.
From: Washington Post
By: Peter Marks
Date: 2014-03-06
8 / 10
Portraying America's 36th chief executive, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in Robert Schenkkan's democratic procedural drama 'All the Way,' Cranston proves so effortlessly captivating that you could imagine pulling a lever for him - or even contributing generously to whatever campaign war chest he trots out. Well, maybe 'effortlessly' is the wrong word. Because Cranston, late of TV's habit-forming 'Breaking Bad,' works like the dickens to convey in his cagey, short-fused, eternally prowling LBJ a strength of will that reveals what a political leader needs to get big things done. It's a darn good thing, too, for without him, the three-hour production, which opened Thursday night at Broadway's Neil Simon Theatre, might feel like something a little duller, along the lines of a talking textbook. Perhaps in the vast cavalcade of Washington events and personalities the play covers, there was not much room left for nuanced portraits. In any event, none of the personages filling out the story, from J. Edgar Hoover (Michael McKean) to George Wallace (Rob Campbell), from Ralph Abernathy (J. Bernard Calloway) to, yes, The Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (Aidem, again), come to feel as anything more than the audience for LBJ's one-man band. Fortunately for us, though, it's Cranston who is holding the baton.
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