Good Night, and Good Luck
Opening Night: April 3, 2025
Theater: Winter Garden Theatre
Website: goodnightgoodluckbroadway.com
Tune in to the golden age of broadcast journalism and Edward R. Murrow’s (Clooney) legendary, history-altering, on-air showdown with Senator Joseph McCarthy. As McCarthyism casts a shadow over America, Murrow and his news team choose to confront the growing tide of paranoia and propaganda, even if it means turning the federal government and a worried nation against them. Under the direction of Tony Award®-winner David Cromer, from the original screenwriters Clooney and Grant Heslov, Good Night, and Good Luck chronicles a time in American history when truth and journalistic integrity stood up to fearmongering and disinformation—and won.
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April 3, 2025
Clooney’s glamour, abetted by David Cromer’s suave direction, does a lot of that work; even when the actor is in some remote corner of Scott Pask’s huge and infinitely reconfiguring set, you find him immediately, torso tilted in the Murrow manner and lit Hollywood-like by the designer Heather Gilbert.
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April 4, 2025
Director David Cromer successfully activates the stage, orchestrating that kinetic hum we associate with a network newsroom. And scenic designer Scott Pask’s set is a wonder, particularly effective in the way it allows different zones of the CBS compound to slide into focus: the writers’ room, the live studio, even space for the house band (the resplendent Georgia Heers as singer Ella is a warm-toned delight).
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April 3, 2025
An empty reassembly of their screenplay, with period chicness substituting for tension, the play doesn’t trust the audience to see the parallels between past and present, creating little more than a well-intentioned echo chamber instead of a gripping 90-minutes of theater.
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April 3, 2025
This transfer from screen to stage is as intense and laser-focused as the penetrating gaze coming from its star and co-writer, George Clooney.
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April 4, 2025
It’s quite a beginning, but then that curtain rises, and as lovingly detailed as Pask’s newsroom set is, Cromer has to enliven a still highly cinematic script in a wide-open theatrical space; the result is that Good Night almost immediately starts to diffuse.
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April 3, 2025
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.
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April 3, 2025
Good Night, and Good Luck certainly doesn’t lack point of view or conviction, but neither of those things can do much with an overly familiar story, a lack of subtlety and an odd tone of understatement that extends to everything from the writing to Clooney’s performance. The actor seems to be fighting against the natural charisma that has played such an important role in energizing his film and TV performances.
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Good news, everybody! You don’t just have to settle for seeing superstar George Clooney on a screen anymore. You can now go see him in person… on a screen!
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April 3, 2025
As a polemical warning bell, the show is earnest and heartfelt. It is considerably less successful as a piece of theater.
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April 3, 2025
By the end, “Good Night, and Good Luck” manages what evening news shows have reliably done for decades: It makes the viewer sleepy.
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April 3, 2025
There’s a lot of very busy, over-the-top acting on stage this season. Clooney bucks that trend, and a feature of David Cromer’s direction of “Good Night” is how restrained he keeps this entire cast of 20-plus actors. His direction lets us eavesdrop on a moment in history at the CBS studios at Grand Central as the country experiences a political earthquake not unlike our current one.
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And Mr. Clooney gives an excellent, self-effacingly modest performance. He portrays Murrow, as the excellent David Strathairn did in the movie, with a stark, almost grim sense of seriousness and wary courage as he embarks upon a journalistic crusade to expose the mendacity and sheer cruelty of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a ringleader of the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s.
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After the disappointing grayness of the over-hyped Othello, I have to applaud an expensive Broadway play that invests in ample set design, including a live band for period-specific, lovely but unnecessary musical interludes. But what the staging delivers in newsroom cacophony, it loses in nuance, character and the entrancing mood of momentous defiance.
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There’s something smugly satisfied about the whole exercise, which ultimately talks down to its audience and assumes we can’t connect the dots. “Good Night, and Good Luck” aims to be a hard-hitting story about accountability and checks on power, but all that ever comes through is dead air.
READ THE REVIEWApril 4, 2025
Clooney delivers a nuanced, commanding performance as Murrow, embodying the journalist’s gravitas and moral clarity with quiet intensity. The ensemble is uniformly excellent, but standout performances come from Clark Gregg and Ilana Glazer, the former giving a revelatory turn as anchor Don Hollenbeck. Glazer’s portrayal is both emotionally raw and tightly controlled, underscoring the internal cost of journalistic integrity.
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April 3, 2025
Will this play, handsomely mounted though it is, actually change any hearts and minds about resistance in America? Or will it merely contribute to Broadway’s drift toward exorbitantly pricey events reliant on star casting? That’s the $799 question. For producers of this show, it may not matter either way. For everyone else, Good Night, and Good Luck is probably bad news.
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But Clooney’s performance is muted. His small gestures – a drop of the head, a tormented facial expression – would play better on camera than in the vast Winter Garden Theatre. Established stage actors, including Paul Gross as network honcho William Paley, Glenn Fleshler as Murrow’s colleague Fred Friendly and Clark Gregg as newscaster Don Hollenbeck, a man defeated by persistent red-baiting attacks, fill out the strong supporting cast.
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It’s a provocative slice of history. At the Winter Garden Theatre, the production directed by David Cromer (The Band’s Visit) is earnest and movie-star handsome (thanks to great work by set designer Scott Pask), but unexciting. It simply fails to catch fire, save for all the cigarettes.
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If there’s not much change in content, “Good Night, and Good Luck” is transformed by its context.
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Unfortunately, Mr. Clooney fails to project either of these qualities. It’s not just that he doesn’t capture Murrow’s distinctive vocal cadence and intonation the way that Mr. Strathairn did; on stage, the movie star simply can’t summon the necessary grit or, more strangely, charisma for the part. Yes, Mr. Clooney can be charming, but his Edward doesn’t command our attention the way a crusading journalist or a leading performer should.
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How powerful is Good Night, and Good Luck? This powerful: Whatever law firm out there listing George Clooney as a client now (or at one time) is well advised to brace for legal pursuit.
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The stage version, again written by Clooney and Grant Heslov, does nothing to enhance the material. It pretty much replicates the film, up to the point of including several time-filling musical interludes performed by a jazz combo and female vocalist (Imani Rousselle at the reviewed performance). There’s nothing inherently theatrical about it, unless you count the extensive use of video that has become unfortunately common on our stages. But hey, it does have George Clooney, now bumped up to lead after playing the supporting role of Fred Friendly in the movie. (Glenn Flesher has inherited it, and does a terrific job.)
READ THE REVIEWApril 3, 2025
Clooney offers a close study of Murrow that compares well with the real thing: His performance is, on occasion, under-vocalized for a venue of this size, but it’s wrought with great care and a willingness to be subsumed by character, not true of all stars of Clooney wattage.
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April 3, 2025
“Good Night, and Good Luck” is both a tribute and a reckoning—a stylish, sobering reminder of journalism’s power and the price of using it. With Clooney’s quiet strength at the center and Cromer’s riveting stagecraft all around him, this production looks to the past but refuses to stay there.
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April 4, 2025
But while Clooney’s charismatic talent carries him smoothly through his Broadway debut, and I won’t begrudge him a commitment to multimedia, you begin to feel a bit cheated witnessing over half of his Broadway debut through screens. (Even from the vantage point of my prime orchestra seat, he is mostly blocked by cameras and other performers.) And what’s around his story – an office romance (between Ilana Glazer and Carter Hudson), an espionage subplot with Murrow’s co-producer (Glenn Fleshler), and a somewhat distastefully underexplored incident with a fellow journalist (Clark Gregg, a warming presence) – first feels dangerously intriguing, then like padding.
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