Bryan Cranston in All the Way; Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Staging a biography is a tricky business. There are a great many characters who are interesting enough to justify a book about them, but relatively few interesting enough to justify a two-hour stage show. Structure is a challenge: Such plays tend either to be something like a stage version of This Is Your Life or one of those tedious single-handers on the Mark-Twain-tells-stories-about-himself model. Holland Taylor’s defective Ann, a play about the Texas governor that managed to combine the worst of both of those tendencies, made a sow’s ear out of the silk purse that is the inherently dramatic if historically minor character of Ann Richards. But open the play up too much and the subject can get lost, just another character in a drama that happens to have some connection to real events rather than the focus of a study.
All the Way finds Bryan Cranston offering a lightning bolt of a performance as President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The lead character and the acting are both so big that it is easy to forget that there are about sixty other characters in the play, too, from a sardonic and charismatic Stokely Carmichael (William Jackson Harper) to a gentle if largely absent Lady Bird Johnson (Betsy Aidem), and, in a particularly nice touch, the duller half of Lenny and Squiggy (Michael McKean) in the role of J. Edgar Hoover.
