Bryan Cranston To Make Broadway Debut As Lyndon B. Johnson
Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston will make his Broadway debut as President Lyndon B. Johnson later this year.
Cranston will reprise the role in All the Way, which is currently playing at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The sold-out run closes Saturday, October 12, and will head to New York this winter. The play originated at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2012 with a different cast. Bill Rauch, the artistic director of the OSF, will direct the play’s Broadway run.
All the Way is written by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Schenkkan and focuses on Johnson’s first year in office. The play deals with LBJ’s handling of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, as well as his leadership during the passage of the Civil Rights Acts.
Full dates for the Broadway transfer have yet to be confirmed, and so far, Cranston is the only cast member announced to be reprising his role.
Bryan Cranston will also be starring in a biopic about Dalton Trumbo, who was one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters in the late 1930s and 1940s. Trumbo joined the Communist Party USA in 1943 and, in October 1947, was one of the “Hollywood Ten” called to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Trumbo and the rest of the Hollywood Ten refused to testify and were blacklisted by the heads of major studios. He was convicted for contempt of Congress and served 11 months in prison in 1950.
Trumbo moved to Mexico after he finished his sentence and wrote 30 scripts under pseudonyms. He won an Oscar for 1956’s The Brave One, which he wrote under the name Robert Rich. The Academy recognized Trumbo as the winner and presented him with a statuette in 1975. In 1993, he was posthumously awarded the Academy Award for Roman Holiday, which he wrote under the name Ian McLellan Hunter.
Bryan Cranston recently won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series (Producer) for Breaking Bad. The series finale of the AMC drama smashed records, drawing 10.3 million viewers.
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