US Edition
Good Night, and Good Luck: George Clooney’s Broadway debut makes for a good-ish night
The star’s 2005 film comes to the stage, with him now starring as crusading broadcaster Edward R Murrow – the results are solid but muted
Even in his Broadway debut, George Clooney is very much on screen. In Good Night, and Good Luck, he revisits the subject of his lauded 2005 film, this time starring as venerated TV broadcaster Edward R Murrow in a large, agreeable production that essentially puts the screenplay on the stage and, like an increasing number of shows, calls on film to help tell its story.
Murrow courted controversy in the 1950s when he dared to challenge Senator Joseph McCarthy’s zealous crusade against suspected US communists and communist sympathisers, and Clooney’s performance shines when he delivers a couple of the journalist’s rebukes to the camera. It doesn’t matter that he’s sitting onstage, in profile, talking into a monitor; the large black-and-white screen image of him projected to the audience is our welcome point of focus.
With bags under his eyes and wrinkles in his forehead, the 63-year-old presents a Murrow persevering to deliver the facts, coolly and articulately, amid a climate of fear and intimidation. They’re the most rousing moments on offer in Good Night, and Good Luck, named after Murrow’s signature sign-off.
Aside from the Clooney factor, the play may best be appreciated by those unfamiliar with the Oscar-nominated film, since the former suffers in the comparison. With its close-ups and shadowy black-and-white cinematography, the film, with David Strathairn playing Murrow and Clooney directing, created an intimacy and an urgency that the stage version lacks.
Even an astute director like David Cromer can do only so much with the play, adapted by Clooney and Grant Heslov from their screenplay. Scott Pask’s set encompasses the CBS newsroom and studio, where a cast of 20 toil among metal desks, typewriters and reels of film, smoking and churning out stories. Like the film, there’s even a jazz singer (Georgia Heers) crooning standards between scenes and film footage of McCarthy and others.
But Clooney’s performance is muted. His small gestures – a drop of the head, a tormented facial expression – would play better on camera than in the vast Winter Garden Theatre. Established stage actors, including Paul Gross as network honcho William Paley, Glenn Fleshler as Murrow’s colleague Fred Friendly and Clark Gregg as newscaster Don Hollenbeck, a man defeated by persistent red-baiting attacks, fill out the strong supporting cast. The talented Ilana Glazer, unfortunately, has little to do as a newsroom staffer secretly married to a colleague whose past makes him suspect.
It’s clear the play’s depiction of an organisation plagued by ambiguous threats from those in governmental power that couldn’t be timelier (just ask Greenland), even though the production was announced before America’s current president was sworn in. The biggest audience laugh comes when a character says he felt “as if all the reasonable people took a plane to Europe and left us behind”.
Murrow giving a speech about the state of television and how it’s “being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us” frames the play, as it did the film. But now the end is accompanied by a video montage of groundbreaking and increasingly tense moments from the past 70 years of television, capped off by Elon Musk’s Nazi salute.
Despite similar themes, the play is the antithesis of Ivo van Hove’s bold, brash adaptation of Network from several years ago, and clocking in at just over 90 minutes, it misses the depth and complexity of a James Graham drama. Good Night, and Good Luck’s message is solid, less so its mode of delivery.
Until June 8; goodnightgoodluckbroadway.com