Whatever the future holds for a certain criminally inclined former President of the United States, one thing seems assured: Somebody will eventually portray him on Broadway. (He’s already been depicted — skewered — Off-Broadway.)  Nearly every past president has made it to Broadway over the last century, as the photo essay below, in honor of Presidents Day, illustrates. Whenever Broadway returns, so will at least three past presidents – Washington, Jefferson and Madison — all in a single show, “Hamilton”; as recently as 2019, three more presidents — LBJ, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama — were depicted in new Broadway plays.

“I think presidents are a natural topic for the stage,” said Bruce Altschuler, professor emeritus of political science at SUNY Oswego and the author of Acting Presidents: 100 Years of Plays about the Presidency  “There is usually built-in name recognition and often passions for and against them,” he told me. “In our celebrity culture, we want to know more about what is really happening, either behind the scenes politically or in their private lives.” And, as he explains in his book, “often, by depicting past presidents, the authors hope to teach a lesson to contemporary audiences.”

Lincoln has been the star of more than a dozen Broadway plays, starting with Benjamin Chapin’s Lincoln in 1906; Washington is a distant second. But even more obscure presidents such as Rutherford B. Hayes have gotten their moments in the spotlight. Hayes and two other presidents were portrayed by Gene Wilder in “The White House,” a short-lived 1964 play by A. E. Hotchner that crammed in 24 of the presidents between John Adams and Woodrow Wilson.

A note about the one president who had worked as an actor, Ronald Reagan. Richard Coombs portrayed him in a 1989 Broadway musical entitled “Senator Joe,” about Joseph McCarthy, but 1. in the same play, Coombs also portrayed six other characters, including Huck Finn, Lenin and a chicken, and 2. It ran for just three preview performances, and never opened.

Click on any photograph to see it enlarged and read the caption.

Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton

Christopher Jackson as George Washington in Hamilton, 2015

Okieriete Onaodowan as James Madison in Hamilton

James Monroe Iglehart was the latest Thomas Jefferson on Broadway in “Hamilton”

Bryan Cranston as President Lyndon Baines Johnson in All The Way, 2014, by Robert Schenkkan

Brian Cox as LBJ in Robert Schenkkan’s 2019 sequel to “All The Way”

Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow as Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton in Lucas Hnath’s 2019 Broadway play “Hillary and Clinton”

Benjamin Chapin in “Lincoln,” 1906.

Raymond Massey as Abraham Lincoln in Illinois. Robert Sherwood’s play, which won the 1939 Pulitzer for Drama, ran for 14 months, and was revived on Broadway in 1993, begins with Lincoln’s childhood. It ends with Lincoln saying goodbye to his friends in Springfield and leaving on a train to assume the presidency.

Darrell Sandeen portrayed Lincoln in “The Young Abe Lincoln” on Broadway in 1971, which was about Abraham Lincoln’s years in New Salem, Illinois, in which he was introduced to politics and romance. The musical is by Victor Ziskin, Joan Javits, Richard N. Bernstein, John Allen and Arnold Sundgaard

Actor Fritz Weaver as Abraham Lincoln in the Chelsea Theater Center’s production of the one-man play “Lincoln”.in 1976. Weaver also portrayed Lincoln in the Broadway play “The White House” in 1964 — as well as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson….all in that same play by A.E. Hotchner

Ralph Bellamy as FDR in Sunrise at Campobello. . Dore Schary’s play, which ran on Broadway for 16 months and won four Tony Awards in 1958, including for best play, chronicles Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s battle with polio and his return to politics. The play ends a decade before he becomes president.

In the 2012 revival of Annie, Merwin Foard (second from stage left) portrayed F.D.R. Foard had previously portrayed President James Garfield in Sondheim’s Assassins. Presidents are frequently peripheral characters. Theodore Roosevelt has a cameo in Newsies

Benjamin Walker as Andrew Jackson in Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson, 2010. The musical by Alex Timbers and Michael Friedman, brought a campy downtown sensibility in its depiction of the seventh president of the United States as a combination sexy rock star, immature populist, and killer. They build in an ambivalence towards Jackson’s legacy with the meta-theatrical device of including a character who is a historian commenting on that legacy – until Jackson kills her halfway through the musical.

In 2015, Theater in Asylum tried out a stage adaptation of the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates, but decided it was more civically useful to adapt current presidential debates for the stage

Will Ferrell as President George W. Bush in You’re Welcome America: : A Final Night With George W. Bush. Written by Ferrell, the juvenile satire began performances on Broadway the day in 2009 that Bush left office.

In “The Trial of an American President,” a 2016 play, George W. Bush defended himself before the International Criminal Court.

Frank Langella as Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, 2007. Peter Morgan’s dramatization of journalist David Frost’s television interviews with the president was set three years after Nixon resigned his office in disgrace.

In “Five Presidents,” a 2015 play by Richard Cleveland that still gets produced around the country, five presidents pay their respects to Richard Nixon at his 1994 funeral. From left, Brit Whittle (Bill Clinton), Mark Jacoby (George H. W. Bush), Steve Sheridan (Ronald Reagan), Martin L’Herault (Jimmy Carter) and John Bolger (Gerald Ford).

Actor William Daniels as John Adams in the 1969 Broadway musical “1776” about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. T

Actors (L-R) William Daniels as future president John Adams, Howard Da Silva as Benjamin Franklin, Betty Buckley as Martha Jefferson and Ken Howard as future President Thomas Jefferson in the original production of “1776”

Peter Francis James as Barack Obama and Laurie Metcalf as Hillary Clinton in Lucas Hnath’s “Hillary and Clinton” on Broadway in 2019

In 2012, a Harvard educated actor named Toby Blackwell portrayed Barack Obama, the 44th president, while he was still in office, in an Off-Off Broadway musical entitled “Obama in Naples.” The play by Italian journalist Claudio Angelini was more about Naples than Obama, who appeared for only about 15 minutes. The Neopolitans greet him as a savior for their troubled city, suggesting he could replace San Gennaro as the patron saint of Naples

Julius Caesar at Shakespeare in the Park. Whatever else you may say about the moment that a Trump-like Julius Caesar – who wears suits with too-long ties, and has a Slavic wife – descended into his gold bathtub in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, it was certainly memorable. This was true (given all the attendant public outrage) even for people who didn’t see it. Opened in June, 2017

Tabatha Gayle as Donald Trump in “Black History Museum According to the United States of America,” an immersive theater piece at HERE Arts Center in 2019.

The drunken Virtual Real Estate Tycoon turned Dictator (T. Scott Lilly) is trapped in his own wall, in Theater for the New City’s musical “No Brainer,” which traveled to outdoor stages in all five boroughs in the summer of 2019

Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris and Jim Carrey as Joe Biden on Saturday Night Live. Carrey retired from his impersonation after six episodes. It’s too soon to see President Biden depicted on stage — not least because theaters have not reopened — but it’s coming.