He was Malcolm (in the Middle)'s dad and then a high school teacher gone very wrong. What else is left for Bryan Cranston but to play the president of the United States. The 36th president, to be exact: Lyndon Johnson, who came into office with the death of JFK, made huge strides with his idea for a Great Society of social reforms, but then got bogged down in the Vietnam War that ultimately drained much of the good will from his term in office.

In the new play, "All the Way", opening tonight (March 6) at Broadway's Neil Simon Theater, Cranston stars as LBJ, newly installed as president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Surrounding him are J. Edgar Hoover (Michael McKean) and Martin Luther King (Brandon J. Dirden), along with wife Lady Bird, war-monger Robert McNamara, racist pol George Wallace and civil-rights activist Stokely Carmichael.

With the closing of "Big Fish" at the end of last year, producer Jeffrey Richards saw an opportunity to bring in the eagerly anticipated drama, which knocked `em dead at its 2012 premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and pre-Broadway tryout at MA's American Repertory Theater. Broadway previews began Feb. 10, with Bill Rauch, OSF's artistic director, staging.

"All the Way" will mark Cranston's Broadway debut, though author Robert Schenkkan's been there before - with his multi-part, Pulitzer-winning "The Kentucky Cycle". That show didn't fare too well on the Great Way, possibly because all the attention that year went to another socio-political epic. Something about gay people, Mormons and angels...

In his New York Times review of the show's run at ART, Charles Isherwood wrote, "Mr. Cranston’s Johnson glitters with an almost salacious ruthlessness," though he did gripe that the three-hour play's complexity proved dramatically diffuse. Variety had no such reservations, calling Cranston's performance "dazzling, far-ranging and moving" and the show itself "grand."
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