Tony Award & Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan will return to Broadway with the second of his two exhilarating dramas celebrating Lyndon B. Johnson's legacy: THE GREAT SOCIETY.
Capturing Johnson's passionate and aggressive attempts to build a great society for all, THE GREAT SOCIETY follows his epic triumph in a landslide election to the agonizing decision not to run for re-election just three years later. It was an era that would define history forever: the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the destruction of Vietnam, and the creation of some of the greatest social programs America has ever known-and one man was at the center of it all: LBJ.
It's all very interesting and fair-minded in a retro kind of way - and surely educational for the young. Its even-handed, centrist point of view is also distinctively out of step with the moment, a Biden-esque island in today's sea of activist progressive writing, even on Broadway. But the whole shebang nonetheless lacks bite.
Should the lack of impersonation matter? It doesn't have to, but it does, especially when David Garrison's Nixon and Bryce Pinkham's Robert Kennedy are instantly identifiable caricatures. Cox has brusque, punchy energy. He can thunder with a king's power and howl with a titan's rage. At other times he's more like an executive who's sick and tired of boardroom fighting but not ready for his severance package. What Johnson actually was is hard to pin down - a hollow colossus, a giant ego, a black hole of need and want, a master manipulator, a bleeding heart. But he was neither king nor salesman: He was an American president. Somehow he's gotten away from this play.
2013 | Off-Broadway |
World Premiere Off-Broadway |
2019 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2020 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Wig and Hair Design | Tom Watson |
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