From: NY1
By: Roma Torre
Date: 2014-03-06
9 / 10
Bryan Cranston is the big draw in 'All The Way,' a biographical drama about President Lyndon B. Johnson. And while the 'Breaking Bad' star actually exceeds the hype, the best news is that the play does, too. With 20 actors in dozens of roles, this is high drama spanning the year between the Kennedy assassination and the '64 election. The main focus is the intense fight to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As staged, the legislation is treated with the gravity of our nation's founding and the suspense of a first class thriller, and despite knowing the ending, we're on the edge of our seats.
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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