Winter Garden Theatre, New York
The actor-director brings his 2005 drama to the stage, now playing the lead role, but while it’s timely and nicely staged, it feels stiff
Time has been kind to Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s sincere dramatization of the broadcaster Edward R Murrow’s on-air tangles with Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Sleek, slim and reverent, the 2005 film recalled a time of both cultural panic and promise, before American attention splintered and television’s road forked toward cable news. In its own era, the movie played in implicit contrast to mainstream media’s failure to interrogate the Bush administration’s dubious justifications for the Iraq war. In 2025, well … now, as in 1953, the lies run rampant. But in Clooney’s stark black-and-white drama, truth prevails.
Wouldn’t that be nice. The ongoing lurch away from due process casts both a haunting pall and a self-congratulatory glow over New York’s Winter Garden Theatre, where Clooney leads a proficient, if stiff, Broadway adaptation of his directorial debut. The 63-year-old actor, who originally played Murrow’s comparatively warm producing partner Fred Friendly, steps into the shoes of the hardbitten broadcaster for his Broadway debut with a palpable sense of purpose. The show, one of a handful of starry, expensive productions this spring, at least has the argument of pressing relevance for exorbitant prices. The past week’s wave of government deportations and detentions, for “ties” to “terrorist groups” without evidence or trial, uncannily echo the McCarthy hearings that falsely accused government employees of colluding with the Communist party.
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