Late in the action of Good Night, and Good Luck, Clark Gregg — in a moving performance as CBS newscaster Don Hollenbeck, banged up by his recent divorce and a persistent smear campaign branding him as a “pinko” — makes the melancholy observation: “I wake up in the morning, and I don’t recognize anything. 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.” You know you’re in a New York City audience in 2025 when those words are followed by showstopping applause.
Whatever gains are made in reworking George Clooney’s terrific 2005 feature of the same name — his second outing as director and still his best — for the stage, the material’s timeliness packs a wallop. When the movie was released, questions of media responsibility and freedom to voice political dissent were already pertinent to the national discourse. Two decades later, they have taken on vital importance that makes the drama land with reinforced urgency — even if the play itself is a flawed vehicle.
Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov have adapted their screenplay about CBS news veteran Edward R. Murrow’s contribution to bringing down Senator Joseph McCarthy as a cautionary civics lesson that doubles as a love letter to the bustle of the newsroom in the early days of American live television.
If the drama at times seems almost as educational as it is theatrical, David Cromer’s deluxe production remains classy, absorbing entertainment. It conjures the professional milieu with evocative detail and captures the grit and backbone of a news team at a time before the major networks lost their exclusivity with the fragmentation of the information landscape.
Cable news outlets that are unapologetic in their leanings, both right and left, started that shift. But social media platforms and podcasts have consolidated a culture in which Americans can choose to receive only news that echoes their own views, blocking out the rest. Misinformation from both sides gets parroted to the point where it’s accepted as fact. Where, Good Night, and Good Luck asks implicitly, do people go now for voices of unbiased integrity? Who are the Ed Murrows of today?
In the film, Clooney played Fred W. Friendly, the writer-producer of Murrow’s weekly primetime newsmagazine, See It Now. Starting in March 1954, the program helped shift public opinion on McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt, and the character assassination tactics of the man himself, which encroached on basic American freedoms.
The long campaign of “the junior senator from Wisconsin” — as Murrow keeps referring to him with wry condescension — to whip up Red Scare hysteria was in large part built on lies, bullying and discrediting anyone who questioned his methods as a traitor. Hmm, sounds familiar.
While he was part of a tight onscreen ensemble rather than giving a star turn, Clooney’s natural warmth and charisma effectively counterbalanced the reserve — the mix of matter-of-fact directness and solemnity — of a never-better David Strathairn’s riveting Murrow. Switching to that role on stage, Clooney leans hard into the gravitas with a constantly furrowed brow, tamping down his movie-star magnetism in a vanity-free performance. It’s a creditable Broadway debut (Clooney last acted onstage in 1986), though perhaps a touch too muted to give the play the dynamic center it needs.
That issue is compounded by the casting of Friendly. Glenn Fleshler is an accomplished stage actor and a better match physically for the real Fred Friendly than Clooney was. But he’s a stolid presence here, playing a character who seems to have lost dimensionality in the translation from screen to stage.
The device that really does work, as it did in the movie, is having McCarthy play himself in archival footage, both from the Senate hearings he conducted and his response to Murrow’s report, which was broadcast on See It Now, allowing no time for rebuttal until the following week’s show. Those clips are projected on various screens around designer Scott Pask’s atmospheric CBS studio set, along with ‘50s-style black-and-white televisions that flank the Winter Garden Theatre’s wide proscenium.
The other element carried over from the movie is musical interludes. Songs from the era are performed here by the CBS in-house band on an elevated platform, with luscious jazz vocals by Georgia Heers, who opens the show with “When I Fall in Love.” One or two of the numbers — Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got My Eyes on You,” Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” — could be interpreted as oblique reflections of the plot, but mostly they just serve as period embellishment. It’s a pleasure to hear them but they also slow down a play that could use more consistent dramatic momentum.
That’s partly due to Murrow being the only character who seems fully fleshed out. A subplot involving newsroom staffers Shirley and Joe Wershba (Ilana Glazer and Carter Hudson), whose secret marriage is against CBS rules, never catches much heat, even if Glazer, in particular, has affecting moments.
The same roles played by Patricia Clarkson and Robert Downey Jr. in the movie felt more essential in establishing just how much tension and paranoia were in the studio, as if the air was poisoned by the fearmongering of McCarthyism. Shirley and Joe’s scenes on stage are among several pointing up the nagging sense that this material played better in closeup.
Clooney gets those closeups via a live camera feed that splashes Murrow’s broadcasts up on a screen. With his salt-and-pepper hair dyed black and the ever-present cigarette in his hand trailing smoke even while on air, the actor captures Murrow’s authoritative baritone and his distinctive way of glancing up from his notes to engage directly with viewers at home.
Those on-camera scenes also allow Clooney a welcome moment of humor as Murrow wraps up a fluffy interview with Liberace, one of the onerous Person to Person celebrity chats he was required by the network to do in exchange for editorial freedom on the news side. When Murrow signs off and the cameraman says, “Good show, Ed,” his forced airtime smile collapses instantly into a scowl.
There’s strong rapport in Clooney’s scenes with both allies and those around whom Murrow needs to step carefully, notably Gregg’s Hollenbeck in the former camp and Paul Gross’ William F. Paley in the latter.
The essence of soft-spoken patrician command in his impeccably tailored pinstripe suit, Gross (Slings & Arrows) makes network chief Paley not a corporate overlord but a principled man who respects what Murrow does and honors his promise to stay out of the news team’s business. But he’s also alert to the bottom line, becoming less agreeable as Murrow’s antagonism of McCarthy jeopardizes an important sponsor relationship and puts the network increasingly at risk.
The play is bookended by Murrow’s speech at the 1958 Radio and Television News Directors Association Annual Meeting, read by Clooney at a podium. His subject is the cause for concern as media abandons its mission to inform and illuminate the public, instead just providing distraction to insulate viewers from what’s going on in the country and the world beyond.
“There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. It is a fight for the very soul of this republic,” intones Murrow. Many would argue that the challenge of which he speaks was fought and lost decades ago. But Murrow closes by asking a question today more relevant than ever: “What are you prepared to do?” The same applies to a warning from earlier in the same speech: “Our history will be what we make of it.”
Murrow’s first broadside against McCarthy is peppered with views that apply very much to the America we now live in: “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.” “We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.”
Even McCarthy’s own words, which Murrow throws back at him to highlight his hypocrisy — warning that a fight between America’s two great political parties will result in the destruction of one of them and the republic cannot endure for long as a one-party system — now seem eerily prescient.
Given the clear parallels between the McCarthy period and the present day that resound throughout the play, it’s questionable whether the accelerated montage recapping the history of American TV in soundbites — from the JFK assassination to unsettling recent events — was necessary to hammer home its point. Some will call it heavy-handed while others will applaud the lucidity with which it traces a timeline to where we are now. The audience at the press performance I caught ate it up and could be heard discussing it on the way out. Perhaps it’s useful to help join the dots?
Irrespective of the strengths and weaknesses of Good Night, and Good Luck as theater, the personal commitment of Clooney, whose father is a former anchorman, seems heartfelt and impassioned. There’s no doubting the sincerity of his belief that this dark chapter of American history has something vital to impart to us in 2025.
Venue: Winter Garden Theatre, New York
Cast: George Clooney, Mac Brandt, Will Dagger, Christopher Denham, Glenn Fleshler, Ilana Glazer, Clark Gregg, Paul Gross, Georgia Heers, Carter Hudson, Fran Kranz, Jennifer Morris, Michael Nathanson, Andrew Polk, Aaron Roman Weiner
Director: David Cromer
Playwrights: George Clooney, Grant Heslov, based on their screenplay
Set designer: Scott Pask
Costume designer: Brenda Abbandandolo
Lighting designer: Heather Gilbert
Sound designer: Daniel Kluger
Projection designer: David Bengali
Compositions, orchestrations, arrangements & music direction: Bryan Carter
Presented by Seaview, Sue Wagner, John Johnson, Smokehouse, Jean Doumanian, Robert Fox, 2929 Entertainment, Participant, Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures
