Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Good Night, and Good Luck is a 2005 film about the 1950s TV journalist Edward R. Murrow and his contretemps with the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, who have now adapted it—albeit barely—for the stage. The Broadway version, starring Clooney as Murrow and directed by the expert David Cromer, is in many ways unobjectionable. It is well designed and full of fine actors doing their jobs. Its subject is timely and its message is on point, and there’s no good reason to see it.
Nevertheless: Because it stars Clooney, in his Broadway debut and his first professional stage appearance in 40 years, the production is now the highest-grossing show on Broadway, with a weekly take exceeding $3 million. The best third of the seats in the Winter Garden Theatre start at $799 a pop; the worst seats, with partial views on the far sides of the mezzanine, are a mere $176. Good night, nurse! Such is the nature of the marketplace, but consumers should be warned that nothing in this production is better than what you can get at home by renting the movie for $3.99.
Good Night, and Good Luck | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
That’s because, in nearly every regard, Clooney and Heslov have just plopped their screenplay onstage and called it a play. Presented live on Broadway, Good Night, and Good Luck is still a 2005 film about the 1950s TV journalist Edward R. Murrow. One central character has been cut for economy, and some creaky screwball banter has been added for humor. But almost every scene from the screenplay is here, often line for line and in much the same order; a large portion of the dialogue consists once more of verbatim quotes from the historical record and real documentary film clips of McCarthy and others. The extent of the faithfulness is, at times, jaw-dropping. For example: The film begins with a montage of chummy tuxedoed men at a gala event, scored to the jazz standard “When I Fall In Love”; the play has no montage, of course, but it keeps the opening song anyhow—now delivered in full by a live singer behind a scrim, in the smooth style of Ella Fitzgerald’s songbook records. (That singer, the rich-voiced Georgia Heers, returns throughout the night to perform the songs Dianne Reeves did onscreen, backed by live musicians.)
Good Night, and Good Luck | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
Good Night, and Good Luck promises the familiar: What you’ve seen is what you get. It is selling nostalgia for the solemn journalistic ethics of men like Murrow, and perhaps also for the old-fashioned type of stoic and handsome leading man that Clooney represents; the show’s publicity photos are even, like the film, in black and white. Onstage, the characters don't have much more color. In the movie—which Clooney directed, and in which he plays Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly—the camera fills in a lot of blanks; it lingers on David Strathairn’s thoughtful face as doubt flickers across it, and a point is made. That can’t happen in the same way onstage, but Clooney and Heslov have made no effort to translate those moments into language and ideas. (The only major addition to the piece is a climactic Fifth Element–style video collage of mounting media horrors.)
It falls to Cromer and his cast to make the story come alive, and they do what they can. Clooney may not always be entirely comfortable onstage, but he acquits himself credibly. It helps that many of his key scenes are delivered straight to a camera, where he’s right at home: When he furrows his Murrow brow and lifts the bags under his eyes, we watch him in close-up on the pillars of TV screens that frame the stage in Scott Pask’s excellent bilevel set (which is beautifully lit by Heather Gilbert). Glenn Fleshler hits all the right notes in Clooney’s former role; the capable ensemble also includes Carter Hudson and Ilana Glazer as a secretly married couple, Clark Gregg as a newsman with a red streak and Fran Kranz as someone I kept confusing with Carter Hudson. The rest of the large cast doesn’t do much except mill about, but it’s nice that Cromer has found room for some Off Broadway mainstays; no one crosses a stage with purpose like Jennifer Morris, who plays a film editor, and it's always a pleasure to see Will Dagger even if, as Murrow’s director Don Hewitt, he mostly just does countdowns to airtime.
Good Night, and Good Luck | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
But what’s the point of all this, and at whom is it pointed? The play begins and ends with excerpts from Murrow’s speech at a 1958 event thrown in his honor by the Radio-Television News Directors Association—a jeremiad at the prospect that television might soon be used “for nothing but to entertain, amuse and insulate.” The threat that news reporting could be eclipsed by competition and reality shows is also raised elsewhere in the play. “$64,000 Question brings in over eighty-thousand in sponsors and costs a third of what you do,” Murrow is told by CBS boss William Paley (Paul Gross, also handsome). “People want to enjoy themselves. They don't want a civics lesson.” What Good Night, and Good Luck demonstrates is that the line between enjoyment and civics is blurred. Some people do want a civics lesson; tut-tutting gravely at the state of the world can make a play seem important, even when it’s just recycling. But what if that's just another form of entertainment and insulation?
Good Night, and Good Luck | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
Where this version strays from the film, it’s in the direction of being less truthful, not more—a couple of documentary clips are now used out of historical sequence—but its pronouncements about integrity, some of which are highly prescient, garner self-congratulatory applause from what appears to be a mostly rich, mostly liberal audience. Will this play, sincerely intended and handsomely mounted though it may be, change any minds about the downward drift of mass media in America? Or will it merely contribute to Broadway’s drift toward exorbitantly pricey events that rely on star casting? That’s the $799 question. For producers of this show, it might not matter either way. For everyone else, Good Night, and Good Luck is probably bad news.
Good Night and Good Luck. Winter Garden Theatre (Broadway). By George Clooney and Grant Heslov. Directed by David Cromer. With Clooney, Glenn Fleshler, Ilana Glazer, Carter Hudson, Paul Gross, Fran Kranz, Clark Gregg, Georgia Heers. Running time: 1hr 40mins. No intermission.
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Good Night, and Good Luck | Photograph: Courtesy Emilio Madrid
