Like tv journalist Edward R. Murrow’s historic broadcasts, the stage adaptation of the 2005 movie “Good Night time, and Good Luck” has a seriousness of function that’s once more dramatically stark, solidly documented and finally chilling. This switch from display to stage is as intense and laser-focused because the penetrating gaze coming from its star and co-writer, George Clooney.
Clooney, who directed the movie and co-wrote its Oscar-nominated screenplay with Grant Heslov, returns to the fabric with a way of renewed relevance, giving a starry highlight to the manufacturing. It’s all within the service of the profiles-in-courage story of Murrow’s groundbreaking reporting of an earlier darkish political interval in 1953 America: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communism campaign.
Right here a extra seasoned Clooney, who within the movie performed tv producer and Murrow’s skilled associate Fred Pleasant, promotes himself to the main function. (David Strathairn performed Murrow within the movie.)
Absent from the stage for many years, Clooney has a deeply felt command of character and a riveting presence. Appropriately Murrow-furrowed, Clooney presents the journalist as a downcast, contemplative, devoted journalist with an occasional flash of dry wit — and even a bit of heat. (Clooney can’t assist it.)
However the manufacturing by no means veers away from the load of its topic, themes and message. Clooney and Heslov’s taut script stays on track, resisting any growth of a narrative that clocks in a speedy 100 minutes. It eschews overloading the narrative with private backstories or psychological evaluation, although an workplace romance lightens the temper and a colleague’s loss of life darkens it.
Just like the journalist and the dutiful journalism it needs to honor, the play is principally instructed with information and, most successfully, within the documented phrases, unpolished pictures and precise broadcasts of that historical past’s main gamers.
In streamlining the script, some theatrical moments might have been misplaced, particularly a pivotal one when Murrow makes his career-defining determination culminating within the 1954 broadcasts exposing the nefarious strategies of McCarthy — with Roy Cohn at his elbow and ear. These broadcasts ultimately result in new hearings investigating the senator himself, exposing the lies, intimidation and false proof of McCarthy’s marketing campaign.
However that second is offered matter-of-factly, which will be the level. Director David Cromer (“The Band’s Go to”) phases the manufacturing with that very same unwavering concentrate on the necessities of the story, because the present’s immersive ambiance successfully pulls the viewers into the previous.
The pressing dynamics of the newsroom have been a magnet for writers in works from “The Entrance Web page” to, extra not too long ago, “Community,” “Ink,” “The Connector” and “Corruption.” With a form of theater vérité, Cromer fills the monochromatic bunker of a set with a big — the forged numbers 21 — and largely male ensemble, all bustling about with myriad duties amid overlapping dialogue and banter.
These roles lean in direction of the generic however the savvy casting of veteran actors nonetheless handle to carry some character to their anonymity with out drawing focus from the play’s principal mission. A number of emerge as extra vital gamers, together with sturdy performances from Glenn Fleshler as Pleasant, Clark Gregg as newscaster Don Hollenbeck and Paul Gross as CBS community head William F. Paley.
Simply as within the movie, the atmosphere of the period and the interior workings of early tv is thick with cigarette smoke, jazz music, and journalistic drive. The dense haze of Viceroys is established and commented upon early, then is discreetly lowered. (There’s solely so many clove cigarettes actors can smoke.)
Scene transitions and much more ambiance are offered by a singer (Georgia Heers, elegant) performing interval tunes with a cool combo in addition to the presentation of kinescopes of ’50s commercials proven on screens on all sides of the stage. Additionally lightening the temper is a clip from Murrow’s celebrity-centric and fashionable “Individual to Individual” interview collection — this one with Liberace — underlying the worth Murrow pays to the community in trade for his broadcasts.
The script additionally reveals that the journalistic efforts usually are not completely black and white. Not all those that had been introduced earlier than the committee had been mischaracterized; the Communist risk was in context of actual nuclear concern; and there have been glints of bias (with Murrow needling McCarthy by at all times referring to him as “the junior senator from Wisconsin”).
Arthur Miller wrote “The Crucible” as a metaphoric assault whereas McCarthy was nonetheless the midst of the senator’s witch hunts, blacklists and private assaults. Right here the metaphor is jettisoned for the precise and stark story, set within the looming world of Scott Pask’s set, Heather Gilbert’s lighting and Brenda Abbandandolo’s costumes.
This historical past lesson could also be a well-known one for many audiences of the common theater-going age, nevertheless it’s nonetheless a strong cautionary story for different generations. However at $777 for a top-priced premium ticket, that youthful viewers could also be largely restricted.
The present makes no apology for its directness, agitprop and literal speechifying, ending the present not solely with Murrow’s well-known 1958 warning on the longer term and affect of the mass media, however with a mind-swirling, two-minute montage of flickering movie clips masking 70 years of American and broadcast historical past. It packs a wallop — and so does this manufacturing.
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