Cleveland Play House’s ‘All the Way’ a riveting Elizabethan drama

 

Bob Abelman

Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal

Member, International Association of Theatre Critics

 

Richard II.  Edward III.  Henry VIII.  LBJ.

 

These famous figures from another time – with their larger-than-life personalities, excessive appetites, unfillable holes in their egos, and Rabelaisian crudity – are the focus of historical dramas that offer insight and perspective on the turbulent and heroic past.

 

And while “All the Way” is a 2014 Tony Award-winning drama that chronicles the first year of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s accidental presidency in 1964, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan’s play is no less epic in scope, no less Elizabethan in style and no less theatrical than the works penned by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

 

And it is no less enthralling.

 

For more of this review, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/.