Presidents on Stage: Respecting the Presidency

Below is my annual Presidents Day photo essay of a century’s worth of stage depictions of American presidents.

Nearly every president has been depicted on the stage at one time or another. There are currently three on Broadway — in a single show, “Hamilton” –– and the current officeholder is mentioned in “The Parisian Woman.”

“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. 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.

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

Daveed Diggs as Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton, 2015

Christopher Jackson as George Washington in Hamilton, 2015

Bryan Cranston as President Lyndon Baines Johnson in All The Way, 2014. Playwright Robert Schenkkan has written a sequel, The Great Society.

Okieriete Onaodowan as James Madison in Hamilton

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 the 2012 revival of Annie, Merwin Foard (second from 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

Actor William Daniels as John Adams in the 1969 Broadway musical “1776” about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The musical will be presented in the Encores! concert series later this season.

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 “1776”

In “Five Presidents,” a recent play by Richard Cleveland, 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).

In 2012, a Harvard educated actor named Toby Blackwell portrayed Barack Obama, the 44th president, 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 Will there be a play about Obama someday on Broadway?.

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

Benjamin Chapin in “Lincoln,” 1906.