Theater overview
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK
One hour and 45 minutes with no intermission. On the Winter Backyard Theatre, 1634 Broadway.
“Good Night, and Good Luck,” the play that opened Thursday on the Winter Backyard Theatre, is an enormous story with an enormous set and an unlimited star.
So it comes as a shock that the impression left by the dusty historic drama because the viewers pours out onto Broadway is so small and fleeting. Good Evening, and What’s For Dinner?
The celeb du jour is George Clooney, who makes his Broadway debut — twice. He’s each the co-playwright and stars within the genteel function of Edward R. Murrow, the CBS newsman who waged a public battle with Communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy within the Nineteen Fifties.
“Good night, and good luck,” was the person’s well-known sign-off.
That line is spoken many instances on this engaging however empty present. I loved trying on the huge and elaborate TV studio and retro fits for some time. However you’ll be able to’t gentle a moist log.
This schlep is a venture Clooney is clearly very enthusiastic about.
Method again in 2005, he directed and wrote the film the Broadway present is predicated on, netting Oscar nominations for Greatest Image and Greatest Director, amongst others.
In that movie, David Strathairn performed Murrow. Twenty years later, Clooney is lastly the correct age to strive his hand on the “See It Now” host onstage, even when it’s laughable that one character says to him, “You have a face for radio.” Yeah, and I’ve a résumé for astrophysics.
The “Oceans 11” actor’s time-capsule efficiency is assured, assured and infrequently aided by cameras and TV screens — instruments he understands significantly better than proscenium arches. The viewers watches his blown-up broadcasts as he delivers stone-faced monologues straight to the lens.
He succeeds about in addition to the beige script permits him to. Which is to say, in addition to he permits himself to.
Clooney the author has not been so beneficiant to Clooney the actor. The half is milquetoast, like a sanded-down model of Atticus Finch who speaks with the repetitive calm of a hypnotist.
He’s even-keeled {and professional} to a fault, as if gunning for sainthood. Which may have been the sincere case with Murrow, however figureheads are much less fascinating than fleshed-out folks. They should discover their humanity. In any other case, we begin discovering the articles within the Playbill.
And as Murrow’s combat turns into existential, with highly effective community execs like William S. Paley (a terrific Paul Gross) rising frightened as the person controversially reshapes what TV information is, the play doesn’t construct to a crescendo or captivate alongside the best way.
There are different missteps within the manufacturing directed by David Cromer.
A proficient jazz band within the nook turns a rebellious newsroom shaken by worry into a soothing martini lounge.
And the buzzing hive of journalists and backstage crew characters performed by the forged of greater than 20 actors, all of whom do good work as they shout in New York accents, are handled as little greater than set dressing.
The closest we come to attending to know anyone is Shirley Wershba (Ilana Glazer) and Joe Wershba (Carter Hudson), producers who conceal the truth that they’re married at work. The purpose of them? I couldn’t inform you.
Most crucially, it was a mistake not casting a, nicely, residing actor to play McCarthy and as a substitute to depend on archival footage of the senator’s accusatory hearings and his rebuttal to Murrow’s stinging critique.
We all the time really feel like we’re watching grainy previous clips shot 70 years in the past and never experiencing a harmful occasion unfold earlier than our eyes.
A traumatic and consequential chapter in American historical past turns into nostalgic, and few issues are deadlier onstage than nostalgia.
Effectively, I can consider one that’s: video montages.
Throughout the previous couple of minutes, the play switches into strident lecture mode and initiatives a flurry of clips exhibiting how TV information has developed from old-school grandfatherly newsmen whose politics had been saved near the vest to the opinionated and fiery hosts of right this moment.
It’s pointless and apparent; shoveling textureless that means into the troth.
By the top, “Good Night, and Good Luck” manages what night information reveals have reliably achieved for many years: It makes the viewer sleepy.
