ALL THE WAY

Reviewed by EUGENE PAUL

Bryan Cranston as LBJ

There’s a classical theatrical bromide been around for ages: “There are no small parts, there are only small players.”  Total bull ca ca. I don’t know how many brilliant actors are walking the streets completely unappreciated because they’ve never been zapped by the Fickle Finger and thrown into the breathtaking experience of showing their very own glorious capabilities.  Full many a rose…

 

Blushing unseen is not Bryan Cranston’s problem, not by a long shot, not any more, especially in his wide open, bravura performance as Lyndon Baines Johnson, combative, then assured president of these United States.  Bring out all the praising stops; he deserves them, the heaps and heaps of praises. But it was not ever thus.  It takes a true fan to remember him, feckless, in “Malcolm in the Middle”, but the cultists who still love that TV show remember him only because he was in it.  Not once did his astounding gift show through then.  He was just a lucky working stiff.  However, the magnificence was there, and it emerged when he had to take a gig on a chancy show on a cable channel, yet.  How lucky we were.

 

All the Way, playwright Robert Schenkkan’s operatically ranging tribute to Lyndon Johnson swells with opportunities for a magnificent actor to invest in the central character, Johnson, and Cranston does not hold back. He is on top of it, he is magnificent. Schenkkan focuses on the excruciating drama inherent in making civil rights – such a cool little phrase –into the burning war it still is as the hot core of his hugely reaching play.  It’s big.  It’s got to be, with its collisions of characters beating, molding, pushing, shoving, twisting, cajoling, demanding trying to shape our so-called representative government in Washington to represent, dammit, their way, except that there was a political  prestidigitator named Lyndon Johnson and it was going to be his way, all the way.

 

Which means greatly gifted director Bill Rauch has to keep us on the edges of our seats.  By showing, telling us our history? How in hell you gonna do that?  In a realistic-expressionistic play? Without fire eaters, jugglers,, clowns, acrobats? Well, maybe yes, in a manner of speaking, but their names are the names already dimming from our recent past.  Hubert Humphrey? (Quaking Robert Petkoff).J. Edgar Hoover? (Sly Michael McKean). Robert McNamara? ( Uneasy James Eckhouse). Richard Russell? (Grim John McMartin). George Wallace? (Smirking Rob Campbell). Names carved in stone in D.C. Others that still ring: Martin Luther King, Jr. (Measured Branden J. Dirden), Strom Thurmond ( Smug Christopher Gurr), Lady Bird Johnson ( Stable Betsy Aidem), Walter Jenkins (Devoted Christopher Liam Moore). Director Rauch has persuaded his superb cast of twenty-four strong, willing actors to play more than sixty famous characters believably with Lyndon Johnson in the middle, befriending, betraying, subjecting all to his conviction, his will.  These are not small actors in small roles.  They reach. Out to us, to each other.

 

But it’s Rauch has to hold them all together. He does so, beautifully, keeping his many actors and his many more characters within Christopher Acebo’s vast, commenting, supporting arena of a setting which becomes a whole range of settings during that fateful year, November 1963 to November 1964.  It’s masterful. Every aspect of getting this great drama on stage seems inspired: Shawn Sagady’s vital projections, Jane Cox’s concentrating lighting, Paul James Prendergast’s careful sound design and familiar compositions, Deborah Dryden’s  cleverness with costuming, and wigs, wigs, wigs as Paul Huntley helps them change heads, Ringmaster Johnson front and center.

 

Playwright Schenkkan’s brilliance impinges upon us. Not only are we experiencing awe for these wonderful performers, we are deeply moved by the subject of the play, the struggle to find a way for all of us to be sharing what all of us should, equal civil rights.  We become deeply disturbed that the battle to put it in place was necessary.  And we are sore and shamed that we, as a nation, fought this battle among us and are still fighting for what should be as free as air.  This is what true theater can do, move us, teach us, change us.  The play is a pinnacle in an extraordinary season of some of the finest in theater.  I wish it would run forever.

                                                         

 Neil Simon  Theatre, 250 West 52^nd Street, near Eighth Avenue.  Tickets:  $65-$242. 877-250-2929 Thru June 29.