A Power Broker at Work

All the Way at the Neil Simon Theatre

Bryan Cranston in All the Way.

            Neil Schenkkan’s All the Way might as well be called The Cranston Show.

            The script is well-written, Brandon J. Dirden, William Jackson Harper, and Michael McKean put in inspired performances, and Bill Rauch’s direction shows promise.  But once Bryan Cranston stalks, in the dark, on stage at the beginning of the show (rarely to leave), he takes command, much as his character might have.

            For five years on AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” Mr. Cranston played a gruff, harried, evil genius, a man who knew how to control people and valued loyalty.  Now he is playing a character with much the same description — Lyndon B. Johnson, the 36^th President of the United States.  (Hubert Humphrey, played exceedingly well by Robert Petkoff, is his Jesse Pinkman — earnest and kind near the beginning of the play, Johnson’s use of him as a glorified errand boy deadens his resolve and morals by the end.)  Mr. Cranston’s range, though, is not in question here.  To play the President, he hunches and walks bowlegged, seeming thirty years older; he adopts a staccato Texan accent that would fool even the oldest Good Old Boy; and he seems to wield so much power that might have scared Johnson himself.  He is an electrifying performer, and every second that he is onstage, calculating wildly the votes he needs and then getting them at any cost, he overwhelms the audience with his pure talent.  He fills the room with heat.  This is a once-in-a-lifetime performance.

            The first act of All the Way traces the period from John F. Kennedy’s assassination (for which Johnson shows a modicum of grief, but not enough to distract him) to the passage of Johnson’s flagship Civil Rights Act, which, as he frequently insists in the play, he needed the country’s grief over Kennedy’s death to do.  The second details the President’s efforts in the 1964 Presidential election, in which he is beset by calamity at every turn but (spoiler alert) wins in the greatest Democratic landslide in the history of the country.  Throughout, the focus is on Johnson’s complex relationship with civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King (Mr. Dirden, in a performance that almost rivals Mr. Cranston’s).  King’s repeated compromise with Johnson on the Civil Rights Act, especially on the removed voting rights section, frustrate him to the point that he agrees to work with SNCC leader Bob Moses (Eric Lenox Abrams) and Stokely Carmichael (the very talented Mr. Harper) on the almost certainly suicidal Freedom Summer project.  (Here some creative license is taken; Carmichael was too low-ranking a member of SNCC at the time to have ever met with Dr. King, and even when Carmichael ascended to its presidency, King always disagreed with and personally disliked him.)  Meanwhile, the conniving J. Edgar Hoover (Mr. McKean, sleekly terrifying) is bugging Dr. King and his associates everywhere they go, at one point even sending Dr. King’s wife recordings of her husband’s adultery.

            The President must deal with all of these problems.  They consume his life — Johnson’s relationship with his wife, Lady Bird (Betsy Aidem), is portrayed as dismissive and harsh in the wake of issues with civil rights.  Equally, they consume the rest of his presidency — Johnson signs off on orders to essentially start the Vietnam War without even seeming to think about it.  This may be because playwright Neil Schenkkan’s Johnson is obsessed with power, and these issues were an exercise in collecting and using it.  But this Johnson — reminiscing sincerely about poor Mexican children in a border town in Texas, about his African-American staff’s inability to enter a public restroom — seems also legitimately desirous of a country where equality for all is the norm.  (Indeed, many of the black characters repeatedly refer to him as “the most sympathetic President since Abraham Lincoln," perhaps a bit optimistically.)  So once again, Mr. Cranston is portraying a character whose innate humanity it is left to the audience to decide.  Moral quandaries aside, though, he is still a whole lot of fun to watch, and that means something, too.

The Bullets Fly Over Different Heads

Bullets Over Broadway at the St. James Theatre

L-R: Vincent Pastore, Heléne York, Nick Cordero, Marin Mazzie, Brooks Ashmankas, Zach Braff, Lenny Wolpe, and Betsy Wolfe in Bullets Over Broadway.

            Woody Allen’s 1994 film Bullets Over Broadway is not the most obvious choice in Allen’s oeuvre for musical adaptation.  It’s an intellectual exploration of what it means to be an artist and to be able to weigh art and love against one another, and its very characters reject the panache and style that characterize Broadway musicals.  (If you were looking for the most obvious choice, Bananas, Sleeper, and Midnight in Paris wouldn’t be bad starts, or, if you were feeling daring, What’s Up, Tiger Lily?.)  But it is the film that he has chosen for his first musical, and, as with everything Mr. Allen does, he has decided that if it absolutely has to be done, it will be done brilliantly and with a heavy dose of nostalgia.

            Bullets Over Broadway: The Musical, which is now in previews and opens April 10, is graced with a book by Mr. Allen, inspired direction and choreography by that great hit-maker, Susan Stroman, and a score made up of 1920s popular music, some more classically popular than others, but all beautiful.  (Glen Kelly deserves a great deal of credit for his almost indistinguishable additional lyrics, which help the songs fit into the plot.)  The production of this show proves another aspect of Mr. Allen’s pop-culture literacy, for the big-band orchestra, the marvelous dance numbers, and the star turn performances recall the musicals of Broadway’s Golden Age—as was clearly Mr. Allen’s intent.

            The musical’s plot hems almost exactly to that of the film: a struggling playwright, David Shayne, is presented with the opportunity to produce his long-incubating play, with the condition that a shrill, untalented mobster’s girlfriend be bestowed with a role.  Shayne, who abhors creative compromise (an obviously autobiographical aspect to Mr. Allen’s writing here rears its head), watches his control over the show slip away as it becomes clear he is not half the artist he thought he was—though, as it turns out, that’s okay.  Here Shayne is portrayed winningly by the endlessly talented Zach Braff, whose musical abilities I had before only guessed at and whose comic abilities, I am glad to see, are still wholly intact.  Mr. Braff arguably plays Woody Allen far more convincingly than John Cusack did in the film.  Rather than Mr. Cusack’s mildly harried, earnest egotist, Mr. Braff plays Shayne as a panicked, neurotic tempest of agitation, which—unsurprisingly—he does without missing a beat.

            Mr. Braff’s performance is only the first of many (or all) in this production pulled off perfectly and with unprecedented talent.  Brooks Ashmankas plays Warner Purcell, the male lead in Shayne’s play, a hammy compulsive eater, with aplomb and incredible dancing skill for one so burdened by a fat suit.  Marin Mazzie, as Helen Sinclair, Shayne’s female lead and muse, is about as good as it gets, though never quite as scene-stealing as Dianne Wiest, who won an Oscar for the role.  (Luckily, Sinclair’s “Don’t speak” routine is intact, and neither over- nor underplayed.)  Heléne York, as the spoiled girlfriend, Olive Neal, is the show-stealer here, just exciting enough to receive ovations for singing “I Want a Hot Dog For My Roll” and just irritating enough for the audience to applaud, too, her eventual unfortunate fate.  And Nick Cordero, as the mobster/ghostwriter Cheech, can’t be counted out either.  He’s a dancer and singer of such impressive caliber that, in a way, he is the glue that binds Bullets together.  (A clever gimmick using “Up a Lazy River,” featured in the film, as his character’s theme song, is intelligently deployed.)

            And it’s the songs, more than anything, that make the show.  From a “Let’s Misbehave” duet between Neal and Purcell to the ridiculous but somehow eminently perfect finale, Bullets Over Broadway is a classic old-school Broadway musical, the kind that, but for people like Mr. Allen, would have disappeared from the stage many a moon ago. 

Indeed, however, but for a few well-placed one-liners (“Is it possible to love two women at once?  Not if one finds out”) and the background creative drive of the musical, the nebbishy, questioning undertone of Mr. Allen’s films—which can actually be quite pleasant under the right circumstances—is mostly absent here.  (The touching finale of the movie, from which stems the classic Allen line “There's two things of which I'm certain.  One is that I love you.  Two is that I'm not an artist” has been replaced with a wonderfully fun musical number that’s actually just as welcome, if not more.)  But this isn’t a criticism.  Because repressing the natural inclination to overwrite is what makes Bullets Over Broadway a great musical that will outlast not just Mr. Allen but probably us all.  So, Woody, here’s to many more.  We on Broadway will be patiently waiting.