By Samuel L. Leiter

April 6, 2025. The big reason many are paying premium prices at the Winter Garden Theatre to see Good Night, and Good Luck is not because they’re dying to witness a famous liberal wrestling a reactionary boogeyman into a political headlock. (The play is about a head-on clash between 1950s muckraking broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow and the communist witch hunting Joseph McCarthy, the “junior senator from Wisconsin,” as Murrow needlingly calls him). 

Interesting as the play is, the fans are flocking to bask in the rare stage presence of Hollywood superstar George Clooney, playing Murrow in a stage adaptation of the 2005 movie he directed and cowrote with Grand Heslove, with David Straithairn as the journalist.  

In typically modest fashion, Clooney’s entire Playbill bio says merely: “George’s last time in an Equity theatre was in June of 1986, a play called Vicious at Steppenwolf Theatre. He has never appeared on Broadway so . . . buckle up.” In the years since, he’s earned respect for his movie work as well as his spokesmanship for liberal (especially anti-Trump) positions.  Thus, his choice of play is giving New York audiences double the pleasure, if not quite double the fun.

Good Night, and Good Luck, whose reviews are all over the map, here a smooth highway, there one riddled with sinkholes, is, to my eyes, a sturdy contribution to the sparsely populated landscape of recent political drama. Despite its film original having been created years before Donald J. Trump entered the political arena, it’s impossible to watch without your antennas picking up signals saying this may have been then, but it also is NOW. 

The hunger for even a secondary work—especially on Broadway—that addresses our contemporary political maelstrom from a progressive direction is evident every time the audience bursts into appreciative applause for a speech or even a line that reflects what we’re going through. Oh, for someone to write a show, be it straight or musical, that directly confronts today’s politics, with no holds barred! 

Framed by a speech Murrow is delivering at a 1958 event in his honor, Good Night, and Good Luck takes place in 1954, when McCarthy is at the height of his career-and-life-destroying power as chair of the Senate investigating committee seeking evidence of communist subversion in American government. Freedom of speech, thought, and association, not to mention of the press (although no one says “fake news”), is being challenged, and even minimal association with red or pink-tinted groups, publications, or even family members, whether currently or in the past, is enough to label you a subversive.  

At a time when there are only three national broadcast stations, CBS, NBC, and ABC, Murrow uses his show “See It Now,” produced by Fred Friendly (Glen Fleshler, outstanding, in the role Clooney played on screen), to expose the ruthless tactics used by McCarthy, who comes on the show to accuse Murrow himself of communist associations. Murrow famously rebuts this, but loses his main sponsor, Alcoa, and has his on-air time reduced by CBS head honcho William F. Paley (Paul Gross).

Meanwhile, a member of the Air Force is convicted (later reversed), without public disclosure of proof, of being a communist sympathizer because of his father and sister’s associations; CBS broadcaster Don Hollenbeck (Clark Gregg, excellent) is accused by McCarthy of being a “pinko,” after which he commits suicide; a secretly married couple, Joe (Carter Hudson) and Shirley Wershba (Ilana Glazer), must decide which of them will retain their job when one must be fired; and, of course, McCarthy is himself investigated by the Senate and reduced to rubble when lawyer Joseph N. Welch demands of him (on a clip), “Have you no decency, sir?”

For the record, however, it should be noted that, powerful as is the inclination to consider Murrow a white knight, it has been pointed out elsewhere—although not in the play, of course—that, prior to being exercised by McCarthy’s rightwing extremism, Murrow was a firm anticommunist and in favor of the execution of the Rosenbergs as Soviet spies; that he was not a neutral journalist but a secret donator and advisor to Adlai Stevenson when he ran against Dwight Eisenhower in 1956; that he lied in several instances on his application for CBS (including a false claim about having a graduate degree from Stanford); and that other commentators had long preceded him in his attacks on McCarthy. 

David Cromer’s production, a smoothly functioning machine with 22 actors that gets the job done in an uninterrupted 100 minutes, occurs within the complex confines of a set by Scott Pask that divides the stage into multiple work areas within the CBS studios located in Grand Central Station (until 1964). A catwalk is overhead and there’s a rehearsal room located upstage left on a high platform, where a singer named Ella (Georgia Heers)—Ella Fitzgerald?—helps evoke the period by warbling, with lots of class, several pop standards placed between certain scenes. Heather Gilbert’s lighting creates just the right ambience of black and white verité to enhance the visual reality.

As in The Picture of Dorian Gray, screens play a major part, giving the play a semi-documentary atmosphere. Numerous small monitors are arranged vertically at either side of the proscenium, but, when needed, there are large drop-down screens. The screens show both the actors playing the broadcasters and, through clips, the actual people being interviewed in 1954, including not only McCarthy, but the Air Force officer and Liberace (the latter on Murrow’s “Person to Person” interview show). There are also authentic commercials from back in the day.

A remarkable montage, which moves faster and faster, comes near the end, shows highlight moments as captured for broadcasting from the time of the play to today, with shocking images including JFK’s assassination, 9/11, Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” George Floyd’s death, and, like an exclamation point, Elon Musk’s right hand shooting toward the skies like someone with Dr. Strangelove’s alien hand syndrome.

Following the montage comes the closing bookend, in 1958, with Murrow speaking his oft-quoted words about how careful human beings must be in using the tools of broadcasting for the sake of illumination, education, and inspiration, unless these tools become little more than “wires and lights in a box.” As is his wont, he quotes Shakespeare, “The fault, dear Brutus . . . ,” to remind his listeners of their responsibility in battling the forces of “ignorance, intolerance, and indifference.”

With the exceptions already noted, the ensemble is not particularly memorable. Everyone is carefully dressed (by designer Brenda Abbandandolo), coiffed, and wigged (by Leah J. Loukas) as per the early 50s, and there’s an abundance of smoke from all the period-friendly cigarette smoking; there, is, though, an ersatz quality to it all. Largely, this is because of a problem endemic to most tobacco-heavy productions in our (largely) post-tobacco world, where nonsmoking actors must pretend that cigarettes are natural extensions of their hands and lips. Forced to drag on herbal stand-ins, they hold their slender props awkwardly, exhale clouds of un-inhaled smoke, and have cigarettes dangling from their lips like lollipops.

As for George Clooney, the show’s big draw, his Edward R. Murrow is not the kind of role requiring theatrical flamboyance. Murrow is preternaturally serious, constrained, and focused, his charm emerging in drily humorous throwaways. As Clooney plays him, the sudden drop in attitude from pleasant host after interviewing Liberace to what-a-waste-of-time-that-was distaste indicates a man who suffers no fools. Clooney’s performance has received a mixed bag of responses, but I thought him convincingly thoughtful and determined, his furrowed brow, sleekly darkened hair, slumped shoulders, chain smoking habit, and world-weary gravitas satisfactorily capturing the famous newsman’s persona. 

What he lacks, though, is the bass, smoking-ravaged, newsreel music of the Murrow voice, which layered what he said with deep importance, much as did that of his contemporary, Walter Cronkite. But he comes close enough and, while his isn’t the type of performance that wins Tonys (although I’ll bet, in this season of so few straight plays, he’s nominated), neither is the role the type Tony voters rally around. It reminds me of 2013, when Tom Hanks, also making his Broadway debut, was overlooked when playing another real-life journalist, Mike McAlary, in Lucky Guy.

McAlary died at 41, and few remember him. Murrow, surprisingly, was only 57 when he passed in 1965. Not only is he still remembered, but he will be for many more years, thanks in part to Clooney’s reminder of how, through the medium of television news, he helped bring down one of America’s most dangerous political creations. Is there any need to spell out what the world needs now?

Good Night, and Good Luck ****1/2 
Winter Garden Theater, 1634 Broadway, NYC.
Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission. goodnightgoodluckbroadway.com
Through June 8, 2025.
Photography: Emilio Madrid