When “Good Night time, and Good Luck” arrived on Broadway this spring, it initially provoked a stunning quantity of cynicism. There have been complaints that the difference by George Clooney and Grant Heslov was mainly a replica of the 2005 movie, which chronicled CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow’s heroic campaign towards Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunts.
The sky-high value of tickets was one other supply of criticism. Was Broadway pricing itself past the attain of its core viewers? Studies of “Good Night time, and Good Luck” shattering field workplace data served to remind those that couldn’t afford a ticket that they had been being left behind by a theater tradition that was siding with the haves over the have-nots.
In a Broadway season that featured Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in a rudderless “Othello” and Kieran Culkin in a “Glengarry Glen Ross” revival which may have been stronger with out him, “Good Night time, and Good Luck” was a handy goal for anti-Hollywood sentiment.
Once I arrived on the Winter Backyard for a Saturday matinee in April, I can’t say my expectations had been particularly excessive. I admired the movie however hadn’t seen it in practically 20 years. The broodingly elegant manufacturing, sharply directed by David Cromer and starring a quietly dedicated Clooney within the function of Murrow (performed within the movie by David Strathairn), was not solely one of the stirring choices of the Broadway season but in addition one of the essential.
I left the theater wishing I might purchase tickets for my family and friends. That gained’t be essential — fortunately for my bank cards — as a result of CNN shall be broadcasting a stay efficiency of “Good Night time, and Good Luck” from the Winter Backyard on Saturday. It’s apparently the primary time a Broadway play shall be proven stay on tv, and the timing couldn’t be higher.
As media corporations face a marketing campaign of intimidation from the Trump administration, the determine of Murrow, standing tall within the face of demagogic adversity, is the brave instance we’d like proper now.
I don’t understand how totally different the expertise shall be watching at dwelling, however “Good Night time, and Good Luck” made me mirror on what theatergoing might need been like in historical Greece. Athenian residents would collect at an open-air theater as a democratic privilege and accountability. Playwrights addressed the polis not by dramatizing present occasions however by recasting tales from the mythological and historic previous to sharpen vital considering on up to date considerations.
Clooney and Heslov aren’t writing dramatic poetry. Their extra easy method is nearer to documentary drama, however the impact just isn’t so disparate. We’re affirmed within the information that we’re the physique politic.
CNN will broadcast the penultimate efficiency of “Good Night time, and Good Luck” on the eve of the Tony Awards. The manufacturing is up for 5 Tonys, together with one for Clooney within the lead efficiency by an actor in a play class. However nonetheless the awards shake out, Clooney is already a winner. Like Murrow, he reminds us that conscience can nonetheless be a defining characteristic of the American character.
