'The Great Society' Coming to Broadway

Michael Paulson

July 22, 2019 2:00 AM

NEW YORK — As soon as the Tony-winning “All the Way” closed on Broadway, the playwright, Robert Schenkkan, turned his attention to the sequel.

Five years, endless rewrites and several productions later, that new play, “The Great Society,” is coming to Broadway.

Producer Jeffrey Richards announced Thursday that he would present a 12-week run of the play, starting Sept. 6, at the Vivian Beaumont Theater (which, although located at Lincoln Center, is considered a Broadway house).

The play will star Brian Cox (“Succession”) as President Johnson, and the production will be directed by Bill Rauch, who also directed “All the Way.” (Jack Willis and Susan Rome starred in an Arena Stage run in Washington.)

The cast will include Marc Kudisch (“Finding Neverland”) as Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, Grantham Coleman (“Much Ado About Nothing”) as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Thomas (“The Little Foxes”) as Hubert H. Humphrey, Bryce Pinkham (“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder”) as Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Frank Wood (“Side Man”) as Sen. Everett Dirksen and Gordon Clapp (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

“All the Way,” which starred Bryan Cranston both onstage and in a subsequent television adaptation, ended in November 1964, when Johnson, who became president upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy, won election to a full term. “The Great Society” follows Johnson until March 1968, when he announced that he would not seek reelection.

“It chronicles the high-water mark of the programs of the Great Society, and the growing tragedy in Vietnam,” said Schenkkan, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for “The Kentucky Cycle.” “It’s an extraordinarily dramatic period, and absolutely urgent — in many ways, I think of it as the origin story for our present political crisis.”

“‘All the Way’ is a drama,” he added, “and ‘The Great Society’ is a tragedy.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Michael Paulson