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Chris
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April 24, 2019

So how will history judge Rupert Murdoch, of Fox News fame? As a devil from Down Under who trashed august journalistic institutions, made a mockery of the phrase “fair and balanced,” unleashed the kind of wild and reckless populism that elected Donald J. Trump, built the Brexit torture chamber, and might just kill intelligent democracy? Or as a populist mastermind who could see the cracks in the walls of the liberal elite’s country clubs, who realized great storytelling always requires distinct heroes and villains, who knew one guy’s fact always is another guy’s fiction, and who figured out long before the other dumb media titans that user-generated content and “Five hot things!” was far more profitable than the tortured copy and long sentences favored by pontificating columnists and critics? Well, as they like to say at Fox News, the new Broadway play “Ink” mostly reports the facts. You decide, dear reader, you decide. At least you will have fun doing the deciding.

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April 24, 2019

Reflections on the heyday of scandalous Fleet Street likely won’t stir Broadway audiences with the same vigor that roused the West End when Ink debuted there in 2017. Little matter. James Graham’s play is so well-crafted that not knowing your Sun from your Mirror is a fairly minor hindrance. Opening tonight in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, the fact-based play, starring a ferocious Jonny Lee Miller (Broadway’s After Miss Julie, TV‘s Elementary) and, in a role that won him a 2018 Olivier Award, Bertie Carvel, chronicles the wild, woolly days of a young Rupert Murdoch and the newspaperman who helped him reshape Britain’s stodgy, moralistic press into something completely different.

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April 24, 2019

Did you hear the one about the guy who sells his soul to the devil? How about the story in which an entire country does the same thing? These cautionary tales intersect to highly invigorating effect in James Graham’s “Ink,” which opened on Wednesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. And don’t worry, uneasy Americans, it’s not about you. Except that it is. Directed with vaudevillian flair and firecracker snap by Rupert Goold, “Ink” is set in London, in the gory glory days of a quaint phenomenon: print journalism.

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April 24, 2019

Rupert Goold is the king of bells and whistles. The English showman rarely resists the urge to infuse a text with kinetic energy by drawing from his ample bag of dynamic stage tricks. That can work to a production’s advantage — his Macbeth with Patrick Stewart amped up the bone-chilling shivers by dipping into a wide spectrum of horror-movie tropes; his theatricalization of regal pomp was just the ticket for King Charles III; and as for his work on the American Psycho musical, well, what invites flashy excess more than a Bret Easton Ellis satire of 1980s rapaciousness? Elsewhere, though, the gilded Goold touch can expose the shortcomings of a mediocre play. That was the case with Lucy Prebble’s Enron, as it is again with James Graham’s Ink.

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April 24, 2019

Garish, lurid and brash, “Ink,” the British import now on Broadway in a Manhattan Theatre Club production, is the theatrical equivalent of its subject, the UK’s Daily Sun — the newspaper that reshaped British journalism and propelled Rupert Murdoch’s ascent to media mogul. Like the tabloid, it feels unsubstantial, rushed and icky.

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