‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ Broadway Review: George Clooney Takes on McCarthy, Then Musk

Here’s a question for those of us who like to read politics into everything: Did Joe and Jill Biden attend the March 20 opening of “Othello” with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal so that their not going to Thursday’s opening of “Good Night, and Good Luck” at the Winter Garden would be seen as a put down of George Clooney, the guy who wrote the New York Times essay that helped scuttle the 46th president’s run for reelection?

Here’s more political musing: Would the line, “I feel like I went to sleep three years ago, and somebody hijacked … as if all reasonable people took a plane to Europe and left us behind,” be in this play by Clooney and Grant Heslov if Kamala Harris had won the 2024 election? If ever there is an applause line in a play now on Broadway, it’s that stunner. Tellingly, the line is not in Clooney and Heslov’s Oscar-nominated 2005 screenplay, of which the stage play by those two men is a very faithful adaptation. The movie runs 93 minutes, the play only seven minutes more.

Minimal are the changes between the movie and the play in this story about CBS legend Edward R. Murrow and his crusade to bring down the Red Scare tactics of Sen. Joe McCarthy in the year 1954. In the movie, but not on stage, there is a Kent commercial, which emphasizes the amount of smoking on-screen. During his “Person to Person” TV show, Murrow now interviews a Liberace who lies much less about his sexual orientation than in the tape featured in the movie. And near the end of the stage version, there is a video image of Elon Musk, who, back in 2005, had been a U.S. citizen for only three years. This image sent shock waves through the Winter Garden like nothing I’ve ever heard or felt before in a theater. The experience is not to be missed.

And there are other reasons to see the stage version of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” chief among them Clooney’s interpretation of Murrow. In the film, David Strathairn delivers a definitive Murrow; on stage, Clooney achieves a similar spectral, almost cadaverous quality. Strathairn’s physiognomy is much closer to Murrow’s. Clearly, Clooney gets help from Heather Gilbert’s subtle lighting, a newly receding hairline and the uncredited makeup that re-sculpts that famous face into something much gaunter.

There’s a lot of very busy, over-the-top acting on stage this season. Clooney bucks that trend, and a feature of David Cromer’s direction of “Good Night” is how restrained he keeps this entire cast of 20-plus actors. His direction lets us eavesdrop on a moment in history at the CBS studios at Grand Central as the country experiences a political earthquake not unlike our current one. The movie version of “Good Night” came out of the George W. Bush years when the big crime was lies told about the reasons for going to war. Today, the McCarthy years are much closer to the first few weeks with President Trump back in office. It is legal permanent residents who are now being denied due process. Back then, it was U.S. citizens accused of being communists. This stage version of “Good Night” makes the jump without ever forcing it. Except, perhaps, with that infamous image of Musk doing his thing.

Cromer does something with his casting that is so old-fashioned it is downright daring. He eschews nontraditional casting. “Good Night” tells a white man’s story and all the chaos that kind of racism and sexism has rendered. On stage here, there are a couple of entertainers of color and a few low-ranking female employers. Otherwise, it is a nasty white man’s world and Cromer shows it that way.

In the film version directed by Clooney, he plays Fred Friendly. On stage, Glenn Fleshler plays Murrow’s producer, and while being equally supportive of the famous newscaster, he adds an extra texture of humor to the role missed by Clooney.

Other actors are not as successful. On stage, Paul Gross presents a very congenial William F. Paley. A bit more of Frank Langella’s malevolence from the film is needed to galvanize the CBS chief’s heated confrontations with Murrow.

The adaptation to the stage also undermines the married couple played by Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson in the film. The Wershbas have to hide their marital status due to some weird 1950s code of conduct at the network. It’s a subtle leitmotif that wafts through the film. Through no fault of the performances by Ilana Glazer and Carter Hudson, the Wershbas on stage come off like some secondary romance in a Rodgers & Hammerstein musical.

Scott Pask’s set design sometimes resembles a musical. It’s so enormous it not only suggests but replicates Grand Central. There are many moving parts, and getting all those different offices, studios and locales into place requires a literalness that isn’t always seamlessly achieved. Here and there, Heather Gilbert’s lighting is far more successful at making these transitions. One could imagine a simpler, more expressionistic production where the lighting, and not the set itself, transports the actors.

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