But even so, the success of Good Night, and Good Luck has been nothing short of astonishing.
But Good Night doesn’t promise the pyrotechnics of Denzel doing Shakespeare, or even Kieran Culkin doing David Mamet.
Like Wicked or Sunset Blvd., Good Night, and Good Luck (the comma, meant to denote a pause in Murrow’s habitual sign-off, is regrettably mandatory) is derived from a preestablished property.
But Clooney and co. have come up with a solution that will bring Good Night, and Good Luck to a much larger audience and also return it to its original source.
Onstage, Good Night, and Good Luck is less insistent on its own seriousness than it was on film, a little more willing to indulge in showmanship for the sake of putting butts in seats.
Stranger Things isn’t the biggest Broadway production, nor is it some hit musical. The history of television news is the subject of a straightforward play. Of course, it stars George Clooney, and there are also some jazzy interludes. That being said, Good Night, and Good Luck has been a phenomenal success. Even though there are only a few performances left—Sunday’s matinee, which is hours before the Tony Awards, will be the final one—the play is still smashing records, earning an incredible $4.02 million in box office receipts in a single week. With the best seats at the Denzel Washington–Jake Gyllenhaal Othello costing almost $1,000, movie-star productions have driven ticket prices to all-time highs this season. Prior to the March opening of that production, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child had set the previous weekly record, which was $2.07 million. Good Night, however, does not promise the pyrotechnics of Kieran Culkin portraying David Mamet or Denzel playing Shakespeare. The play’s stern hero, the renowned newsman Edward R. Dot Murrow, stands behind a lectern, facing the audience at the start and finish of this sobering analysis of journalistic ethics. And it continues to receive thunderous applause every week, filling the vast Winter Garden Theatre, which was once the home of the Cats.
such as Sunset Blvd. or Wicked. , Good Night, and Good Luck (the comma, which is unfortunately required to indicate a pause in Murrow’s customary farewell) is derived from a predefined property. But the 2005 film that served as its inspiration wasn’t a hit, and despite receiving six Academy Award nominations, it didn’t win any. Clooney, who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with his longtime collaborator Grant Heslov, made it obvious why he felt the time was right to restate its message about the value of a fearless and unyielding press, particularly when it comes to dispelling the falsehoods of right-wing ideologues. Less was known about how a film that emphasized the power of the filmed image would translate to the stage, or whether audiences weary of resistance would attend in such large numbers or at such a high price. (I saw a Wednesday matinee last week, and the cheapest unobstructed ticket I could find was slightly less than $300. ).
The Broadway adaptation, which centers on Murrow’s televisual conflicts with red-baiting Sen, adheres closely to the film’s plot. Featuring a cast of almost two dozen, a jazz combo sitting on a platform above the stage, and an auditorium filled with monitors brought to life by Murrow’s CBS broadcasts, director David Cromer has transformed Joseph McCarthy, who is bookended by passages from his 1958 speech to a convention of news directors, into a true theatrical extravaganza. But it’s safe to say that audiences aren’t drawn to that. Clooney, the prospect of spending an hour with people who share your worries about the world, nod in the same spots, and cheer the same lines—a crowd that could, as it did the afternoon I saw it, put you a few feet away from Anderson Cooper or even Barack and Michelle Obama, as it had the previous evening.
In what became known as the “Wires and Lights in a Box” speech, Murrow frequently describes television as an “instrument,” a powerful tool with no set function. It can be used to enlighten, entertain, or mislead. However, even after facing off against McCarthy, who abused unsubstantiated and ambiguous accusations of communist infiltration to increase his own authority and destroy countless lives, he was more concerned about the absence of information than with inaccurate information. Although Clooney and Heslov only use a small portion of Murrow’s entire remarks, one word and its variations stand out in particular in their excerpts, which Clooney delivers against a backdrop of complete blackness. That word is insulate. As Clooney as Murrow cautions, “the tube is flickering now, and we will soon see that the whole struggle is lost if this instrument is good for nothing but to entertain, amuse, and insulate.”. “”.
Even though the play is performed in color, unlike the film, it still has a tendency to depict that struggle in black and white. We are supposed to view Murrow’s departure from his news show See It Now as an unacceptable stain on his gravitas when he hosts Person to Person, which used then-novel remote technology to interview celebrities in their homes from the CBS studios in Manhattan. Following his conversation with Liberace, who, like other historical figures in the play, is portrayed by video from the actual broadcast rather than by the actor, Clooney’s Murrow maintains his pained smile for a beat before lowering it into a stern scowl that causes the audience to laugh knowingly. Although Person to Person also included well-known figures like Harry Truman, Leonard Bernstein, and John Steinbeck, that wouldn’t support the clear division between entertainment and education that Clooney and Heslov appear committed to presenting. Images from I Love Lucy are shown on a screen later in the play, but this is done to frame it as a pointless diversion rather than to honor a TV icon.
Compared to the film, Good Night and Good Luck is less adamant about its own gravity on stage and is slightly more inclined to use showmanship to fill seats. Clooney has donated millions of his personal funds to charitable causes and is an activist, but he is also a ham, and he goes to great lengths to hide that aspect of himself from a paying audience. His Murrow has the heart of a striver, the resolve of a boss who makes people stay late without being asked, and the heart of a man who stays later himself, but he lacks the flinty authority of David Strathairn’s film version and the weary disposition of a good man beaten down by the injustices of the world.
Ironically, Good Night, and Good Luck fails to recognize that Murrow was a talented performer in his own right—not an entertainer, but someone who understood how to use the constraints of his nascent medium to his advantage and portray moral seriousness on screen. When you watch the actual See It Now report on Joe McCarthy, you can observe how he uses his eyes to signal the cut from his direct-to-camera statements to the senator’s video, highlighting his history of making illogical and contradictory statements. Jon Stewart would establish his reputation using a more intense variation of the same technique half a century later. At one point, while the camera looks over his shoulder, Murrow responds to McCarthy’s accusation of bias in the “left-wing press” by leafing through a stack of newspapers and reading their coverage out loud. In a cleverly straightforward method of mimicking a montage without a single cut, half the screen is occupied by his back, while the other half shows the headlines flashing by as he takes one centrist paper after another from the anti-McCarthy pile.
As See It Now’s title suggests, Murrow and his CBS colleagues, including producer Fred W. The future creator of 60 Minutes, Don Hewitt (Will Dagger), and Friendly (Glenn Fleshler) recognized that television’s power lay in presenting viewers with the truth rather than merely telling them. In a sense, Good Night, and Good Luck is merely a ploy to get modern audiences to watch the copious amounts of historical material the show includes, not only of McCarthy but also of the individuals he accused, such as Annie Lee Moss, a middle-aged widow whom he claimed was a Soviet spy, and those enmeshed in the atmosphere of fear he stoked, such as Reserve Lt. According to evidence that neither he nor his attorney were permitted to view, Milo Radulovich was expelled from the Air Force due to suspected Communist familial ties. Murrow replies, “Isn’t it?” when Friendly explains that Radulovich’s case has nothing to do with McCarthy’s witch hunt. Moss was ultimately exonerated of the charges, and Radulovich was reinstated following the airing of the See It Now report. You can see how adept McCarthy was at inciting hysteria and sidestepping pointed questions when you watch him today. You can also see how television, including Murrow’s report and the widely televised Army-McCarthy hearings, ultimately proved to be his undoing. He frequently interrupts speeches in the See It Now video to laugh at his own jokes. In a more media-defined era, this wheezy, apprehensive laugh would have instantly ended his career. Murrow had the truth on his side, which helped, but he could have won the competition anyhow.
The stage production of Good Night, and Good Luck focuses the audience’s attention on a range of frames, both inside and outside the proscenium, whereas the film version can just fill the screen with old footage. Initially projected in the rear of a news conference, Radulovich is followed by additional screens that eventually move onto the stage and enlarge until they dwarf the people in front of them. A large camera moves directly between Murrow and the audience as he narrates his live introduction to one See It Now, preventing them from seeing the celebrity they have paid to see up close, even though the broadcast is still playing around them. Like the historical personalities whose pictures he performs alongside, they can only see Clooney on television. Clooney was so distracted by a ringing cell phone during his closing remarks that he stammered his lines during my performance. He made a gesture that was reminiscent of his ER days: he tipped his head forward and twisted his mouth into a smile. We briefly had the opportunity to see the movie star in person. He vanished after that.
Initially, Clooney and Heslov intended to conclude their film with a montage of TV’s greatest hits, illustrating the medium’s impact from Murrow’s time to the present. The concept was abandoned, but it reappears in the stage adaptation. The collection of episodes, which spans from The Jerry Springer Show to 9/11, appears to be intended to emphasize Murrow’s argument that television can be utilized for both positive and negative purposes, and that ultimately, it is up to us to decide which option to accept. However, so do the accountability and repercussions of making a bad decision. Murrow’s story isn’t one of complete success; the play doesn’t say so, but the 1958 speech’s abrasive tone was definitely influenced by See It Now’s cancellation three months prior. And CBS itself recently made headlines when it offered to pay Donald Trump $15 million to settle his lawsuit against 60 Minutes, allegedly in exchange for permitting a multibillion-dollar merger with its corporate parent. In the same week that it allegedly fired its chief national security correspondent after one of his reports cost the network $5 million in a defamation lawsuit, CNN is promoting its historic Broadway simulcast. The forces that distorted the news in Murrow’s time have only gotten stronger and its defenses have become more flimsy. Those sitting in the dark while George Clooney reminds them of their obligations are the last line of defense.
