LBJ The Musical is a tragic, comic rock musical from the minds of two brothers who have collaborated since birth.  Inspired by the books of Robert Caro, Kenny and Marc Dinkin started spending their summers reading biographies of Johnson, trading musical ideas and hatching a plan. Growing up in the 1970s allowed the brothers to look at the 1960s as a whole, seeing it begin in an innocent hopeful time and moving to a time where ugly truths were exposed and untruths uncovered forcing Americans to uncomfortably confront their own weaknesses, greed, cruelty and at long last, their durability as a nation, a community and an idea.

 

By any measure America's 36th president was a puzzling if towering figure in 20th Century Politics. A conundrum of a man, at once a bully, a cretin, a loudmouth, a braggart, but also a compelling, compassionate and passionate warrior for civil rights, voting rights and economic rights.  A president with a bold and breathtaking record for successfully pushing through revolutionary legislation, while at the same time, a man without, it seems, a drop of decency or genuine integrity.  A man who may have legislated undignified on the toilet, but whose legislation brought dignity to so many.

 

The musical offers you a glimpse of how this unlikely hero from the South left his mark on American society, finally chipping away at centuries of Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised people of color in what was supposed to be the Land of the Free.  How the same ruthless lust for power that drove Johnson to destroy people, anyone, who got in his way, allowed him to be the one to enact Civil Rights into Law.  How the real heroes of the 1960s, John Lewis, Dr. Martin Luther King, and anyone who fought for their rights in the South and throughout the country, needed a Machiavellian warrior at the top who knew how to twist the system to get things done.  A warrior, who may have had been in the game for his own power, but also, somewhere underneath that ambition, had a deep sense of what was right.  And once he set his sights on making things right, just had to get his way, had to win.  And this would be his undoing in Vietnam, in many ways shattering the legacy he had spent decades building.

When he finally realized the War was not worth fighting any more, this man obsessed with winning dropped out of his race for re-election and retired to the ranch, with only Lady Bird to remind him of his victories.