[As with the previous
installment, Part 3 of “Good Night,
and Good Luck (CNN, 7 June 2025)” picks up right where Part 2 left off. It’s been my practice to include a review
survey in my performance reports, and Part 3 of this serialized report is devoted
to the published critiques of the play.
[I nevertheless urge readers who’ve just joined this series to go back to Thursday, 24 September, and Sunday, 27 September, and read the first installments before reading the final one. Since GNGL is based on history that goes back to 1954, I have inserted commentary to define, identify, or explain references with which some visitors to Rick On Theater may not be familiar. I haven’t, however, repeated those comments from the first two parts in the continuation below. Part 3 won’t make a lot of sense without having read Parts 1 and 2.]
GOOD NIGHT, AND
GOOD LUCK LIVE: CNN SPECIAL EVENT
(Continued)
The press response to GNGL was mixed. (There weren’t any reviews specifically relating to the CNN telecast.) Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post opens with:
“Good Night, and Good Luck,” the play that opened Thursday at the Winter Garden Theatre, is a big story with a huge set and an enormous star.
So it comes as a surprise that the impression left by the dusty historical drama as the audience pours out onto Broadway is so small and fleeting. Good Night, and What’s For Dinner?
Characterizing the play as an “attractive but empty show” and calling it a “schlep” [for those not up on their Yiddishisms: a drag], Oleksinski admits, “I enjoyed looking at the massive and elaborate TV studio and retro suits for a while,” then slams the production with: “But you can’t light a damp log.”
Clooney’s “time-capsule performance is assured, confident . . . as he delivers stone-faced monologues straight to the lens.” The Post reviewer adds, “He succeeds about as well as the beige script allows him to,” for which he blames the playwright: “Clooney the writer has not been so generous to Clooney the actor. The part is milquetoast, like a sanded-down version of Atticus Finch who speaks with the repetitive calm of a hypnotist.”
“He’s even-keeled and professional to a fault,” Oleksinski asserts, “as if gunning for sainthood. That might have been the honest case with Murrow, but figureheads are less fascinating than fleshed-out people. They need to find their humanity.”
Paul Gross is “terrific” as Paley and the cast “all . . . do good work,” but “are treated as little more than set dressing.”
In conclusion, the Post reviewer finds “A traumatic and consequential chapter in American history becomes nostalgic, and few things are deadlier onstage than nostalgia.” He goes on to say,
During the last few minutes, the play switches into strident lecture mode and projects a flurry of clips . . . . It’s unnecessary and obvious; shoveling textureless meaning into the trough. By the end, “Good Night, and Good Luck” manages what evening news shows have reliably done for decades: It makes the viewer sleepy.
In the New York Times, Jesse Green, who describes the play as “a slender, swift and healthy exercise in hagiography, burnishing its saints and martyrs to a high sheen,” declares that “when the entire cast of 22 is onstage at once, freaking out while counting down to a live broadcast, you feel the excitement of a let’s-put-on-a-show musical.”
The Timesman pronounces Glenn Fleshler (Friendly) and Paul Gross (Paley) “terrific,” and labels Clark Gregg (Hollenbeck) “an excellent actor.” David Cromer’s direction is “suave” and Scott Pask’s set is “huge and infinitely reconfiguring.”
Green’s conclusion about the play is somewhat dichotomous, however:
I wish “Good Night, and Good Luck” were more often . . . subjective. Instead, influenced by Murrow’s example, it keeps things mostly cool and concrete. . . . Probably this was wise; when the show suddenly gets hot at the end, with a montage of television news since the 1950s, it feels overheated. Preachers preaching to the converted usually do.
In a later Times article, James Poniewozik says that “the play is mainly a warning about the media business, as well as a tribute to the power of TV.” He concludes, “As a drama, ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ is decent and earnest, the equivalent of a well-crafted pay-cable docu-movie. But as an alarm, its tone is keening and its timing supernaturally perfect.” Of the central performance, Poniewozik finds “Clooney’s Murrow is heroically all-business. He is analytical and dispassionate; the most heated thing about him is the glowing tip of the cigarette that precedes him onstage.”
The Los Angeles Times was the only outlet that ran a TV-explicit review. Robert Lloyd, the television critic, declares that on Saturday, 4 June 2025, “‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ . . . became a Major Television Event.” He avers that televising plays is “a great practice; I wish it were done more often.”
As I quote him earlier, however, Lloyd labels the telecast a “stunt.” On the positive side, though, the LA Times reviewer adds that
it offered the groundlings at home the chance to see a much-discussed, well-reviewed production only a relatively few were able to see in person—which I applaud on principal and enjoyed in practice—and which will very probably not come again, not counting the next day’s final performance.
Characterized as “a combination of political and backstage drama,” “the play’s discussions of habeas corpus, due process, self-censoring media and the both-sides-ism that seems increasingly to afflict modern media feel queasily contemporary.”
Lloyd offers a differentiation between a film and a live theater performance:
Though modern stage productions, with their computer-controlled modular parts, can replicate the rhythms and scene changes of a film, there are obvious differences between a movie, where camera angles and editing drive the story. It’s an illusion of life, stitched together from bits and pieces. A stage play proceeds in real time and offers a single view (differing, of course, depending on where one sits), within which you direct your attention as you will. What illusions it offers are, as it were, stage magic. It’s choreographed, like a dance, which actors must repeat night after night, putting feeling into lines they may speak to one another, but send out to the farthest corners of the theater.
He seems to overlook, despite his status as a TV reviewer, that some of that liveness is lost when the theater performance is viewed through TV cameras and a television screen.
Lloyd finds that “Clooney, whose furrowed brow is a good match for Murrow’s, did not attempt to imitate him, or perhaps did within the limits of theatrical delivery; he was serious and effective in the role . . .” and declares Clark Gregg as Don Hollenbeck “very moving in the only role with an emotional arc.”
He characterizes Scott Pask‘s set as
an ingenious moving modular arrangement of office spaces, backed by a control room, highlighted or darkened as needs be . . . . Though television squashed the production into two dimensions, the broadcast nevertheless felt real and exciting . . . .
He reports that “director David Comer let the camera play on the players, rather than trying for a cinematic effect through an excess of close-ups and cutaways.”
In a line reminiscent to me of Melina Mercouri’s Ilya in Jules Dassin’s 1960 Never on Sunday, Lloyd brings up “the curtain call, to remind you that whatever came before, the actors are fine, drinking in your appreciation and sending you out happy and exhilarated and perhaps full of hope.”
(As New York Times film reviewer Bosley Crowther
observed in 1960, Ilya, a patron of Greek stage tragedies, “won’t believe Medea
kills her children. After all, don’t
they come out on the stage for curtain calls.”)
Naveen Kumar of the Washington Post reports, “History often repeats on Broadway, where revivals and remakes dominate over the new. But the stage adaptation of “Good Night, and Good Luck” . . . speaks so directly to the present moment that if the story weren’t true—and the film hadn’t already been made in 2005 — it would seem almost pandering.”
He continues:
the docudrama is a sobering yet galvanizing account of how civil society has previously responded to threats from the top. The hero’s tale with a ramrod moral center . . . will be catnip for certain beleaguered crowds desperate for a shred of hope.
What they’ll get is a handsome and sensuously detailed production, from director David Cromer, that elevates the grubby busywork of reporting the news into a finely choreographed art. Call it a rallying cry for integrity from both the media and the masses.
Clooney’s Murrow, says Kumar, “is dry and unflappable with a perpetually furrowed brow, a slicked side part . . . and an earnest, steady gaze.” Clooney is “cautious and contained—due to his character’s strict composure . . . .”
The WaPo review-writer describes Scott Pask’s set as an “appealingly analog television studio,” Heather Gilbert’s lighting as “warm but noirish,” and Brenda Abbandandolo’s “mid-century office wear” as “sharp.”
In USA Today, Patrick Ryan dubs GNGL “a well-timed warning about the threat of McCarthyism with all the subtlety of a jackhammer.”
“Clooney acquits himself admirably as Murrow,” writes Ryan. “He unflappably captures Murrow’s stoic charm and steady cadence, and his direct-to-camera monologues about courage and conviction earn dutiful applause from the starstruck audience.”
The USA Today review-writer determines that Clooney “is buttressed by a commendable supporting cast, who make the most of what little they have to work with.” He singles out Clark Gregg as Don Hollenbeck and Ilana Glazer as Shirley Wershba for specific commendation.
“The production is handsomely crafted with elaborate sets by Scott Pask and smartly tailored costumes from Brenda Abbandandolo,” reports Ryan. “Unfortunately, they’re let down by director David Cromer . . ., who only fleetingly captures the electricity that makes any good journalism drama tick. Rarely do we ever feel the frenzied rush of bringing a broadcast to air,” laments the reviewer.
Ryan, however, also voices a major disappointment: “Where ‘Good Night’ missteps is in its stage adaptation, or rather, the lack thereof. For anyone who has watched the film recently, it’s striking how little has been done to bring this story into a new medium.” He complains that the script shows “little interest in probing Murrow’s interior life or deepening the relationships between characters.”
“Clooney’s intentions are completely admirable,” Ryan assures us. “And yet, ‘Good Night’ only dares to say what we already know, underlined in red ink with umpteen exclamation points.” The writer concludes:
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.
That’s radio and TV jargon for an unintended interruption in a broadcast during which nothing is transmitted.
The Wall Street Journal’s Charles Isherwood dubs GNGL “the stylish but stolid stage adaptation—transcription might be a more apt term—of the 2005 movie . . . .” The WSJ review-writer affirms that “for those who saw the movie—I assume a considerable portion of the audience—the theatrical version offers little that's fresh, or even more fully fleshed out.”
Isherwood finds that Clooney “gives an excellent, self-effacingly modest performance. He portrays Murrow . . . with a stark, almost grim sense of seriousness and wary courage . . . .” He adds, however, that “while the supporting cast is uniformly fine, few have significant amounts of stage time.”
Singled out, he observes,
As Don Hollenbeck, . . . Clark Gregg turns in a brief but quietly moving performance. Glenn Fleshler brings wry humor . . . to his role as the producer Friendly. Paul Gross has a stately presence as CBS chief William Paley . . . .
“The talented director, David Cromer,” asserts Isherwood,
works feverishly to fill the ample Winter Garden Theatre stage with background movement to complement the generally brief scenes in the foreground. But the production never breaks free of the source material to become a captivating or original theatrical event . . . .
The review-writer adds that “the cast . . . has little to do except fill the stage with movement . . . .”
Isherwood concludes by musing that
while the stage show is, like the movie, admirably free of plain preaching or righteous fictionalized speeches, audiences attending are likely to be coming from two camps: rabid fans of Mr. Clooney who can afford the staggeringly high prices (many tickets sell for $800), or those who share Mr. Clooney's liberal political views and can afford those ticket prices. Or is that just one camp?
In any case, few among them are going to come away enlightened—or even consistently entertained.
In Good Night, and Good Luck, “Clooney leads a proficient, if stiff, Broadway adaptation of his directorial debut,” declares The Guardian’s Adrian Horton. “Clooney and his longtime creative partner Grant Heslov have clearly altered their original script with an eye for the current climate,” Horton observes, “in ways ranging from natural to forced . . . . From the minute Clooney steps on stage as the celebrated war correspondent with authoritative bearing, the production resounds with pious reverence, the preponderance of Good History.”
“There’s an echo quality to the stage version—imitative, resonant but hollower than the original,” reports the Guardian reviewer. “That’s partly an issue of medium; the film flowed nimbly between whirring camera and tight closeups . . . . The play necessarily relies on a macro view that, in comparison, feels rigid and affected.”
“The show also makes an uneasy compromise on medium, betting too much on television,” asserts Horton. “Cromer stages each of Murrow’s verbatim broadcasts with Clooney facing perpendicular to the audience,” explaining, “But it keeps him at a curious, cold remove.”
“There is . . . an ebb and flow to witnessing Good Night, and Good Luck on stage,” Sara Holdren tells us in her Vulture/New York magazine review, “as the potency of its content only intermittently melds with the capacities of its form.”
Later, Holdren demurs somewhat, adding that “there’s something a touch too shaggy in [the play’s] current theatricality to keep us consistently attuned to its turns and its stakes.”
“Cromer’s stage picture yearns and glows,” reports Holdren, but the director “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.”
Scott Pask’s set is “meticulously researched,” the New York magazine reviewer finds, but “[t]he production’s palette is perhaps its purest triumph: a gorgeous sepia-to-gold-leaning universe, evoking cinematic black-and-white while infusing it with a warm pulse.” Brenda Abbandandolo has costumed the cast in a “spot-on profusion of pencil skirts and pinstripes.”
Clooney, asserts Holdren, “carries [a] sense of responsibility onto the stage. He’s not exactly dazzling, but that’s not the point: Murrow’s charisma lay in his gravity, his wry composure and his absolute refusal to break under pressure. Clooney has that solidity and resolve . . . .”
Of the cast, the review-writer finds “Paul Gross is a highlight as CBS’s cagey chief, Bill Paley, but [Carter] Hudson and [Ilana] Glazer can’t hook us, and Glazer in particular struggles to find definition for Shirley [Wershba].
“[T]here are brilliant theater actors like Will Dagger (playing Don Hewitt, ‘See It Now’’s stressed-out director) getting a little lost in the swirl of Camels and khakis,” observes Holdren. “He pops out now and then, delightful as always . . . .”
In The New Yorker, Helen Shaw says,
Clooney is certainly graceful. He looks just right in the elegant swing of nineteen-fifties trousers—Brenda Abbandandolo designed the costumes—and he excels, as he has for more than thirty years, at communicating a winning kind of weary resolve. But theatrical acoustics can be unforgiving, especially with an actor who tends to swallow his lines, however slyly. Accordingly, to capture Clooney’s charisma, the production relies on closeups, shot live onstage by a bulky CBS camera and projected onto a large screen near the audience. It’s a strategy with diminishing returns, though it does allow us to see the strain in Clooney’s eyes when Murrow feels the pressure.
The co-writers “are too accustomed to telling half their story through visuals, and some scenes needed more of an overhaul for such a different dramatic form.” Furthermore, “despite many cross-stage entrances, Cromer fails to bring the film’s sense of bustling movement to the stage.”
Dalton Ross’s Entertainment Weekly notice echoes much
of the criticism of the script, reporting that “while the story may be as
timely and important as ever, the adaptation feels somewhat constrained by its
reliance on the medium it celebrates and, by the end of the show, skewers.” He characterizes the stage version of GNGL
as “a pretty much verbatim retelling of the film, which is both a strength and
a weakness” and gives the production a grade of B.
If only he were delivering it directly to the audience. Instead, the star is often tucked into a corner of the set looking away from the seats and to a camera, which then transmits the image to a giant screen in the middle of the stage along with 10 monitors along the perimeter. Sure, the choice makes narrative sense considering the medium—putting theatergoers into a 1950s living room setting to receive the transmission much as viewers did back then—but, like, isn’t that what the film is for? Wouldn’t this stage-set Murrow delivering his broadcast directly to the audience be a fresher and more emotionally connecting take?
Ross praises “Scott Pask’s deep and clever set design” which provides “a well-designed stage.” Among the cast, he spotlights “[t]he always great Clark Gregg [who] adds tragic anxiety . . . as Don Hollenbeck . . . [and] Fran Kranz [as] the guy [Palmer Williams] waiting to find out if his past associations will doom both him and his work on the show.”
Like several other reviewers, Ross finds “the side story about Ilana Glazer and Carter Hudson [the Wershbas] . . . hiding their marriage from the rest of the newsroom still feels undercooked and a bit divorced from the thrust of the show.”
When Ross follows Paley’s line I quote above (what happens to “news with a dash of commentary . . . when it isn’t Edward R. Murrow minding the store?”) to its logical conclusion, however, he affirms we get “a new ending for the stage that forces the audience to examine the media, the medium, and ourselves just as harshly as any politician.”
He’s referring to the news-clip montage, and he’s one of the few reviewers who found benefit in it. The EW writer pronounces it “the one time in which the almost omnipresent screen does something truly inventive and surprising.”
So surprising as to lead to audible audience gasps. Let’s just say this production of Good Night, and Good Luck won’t likely be playing the new Kennedy Center anytime soon.
And that was written more than a year before the current state of the Kennedy Center under Donald Trump.
“Whatever gains are made in reworking George Clooney’s terrific 2005 feature of the same name . . . for the stage,” asserts David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter, “the material’s timeliness packs a wallop . . . —even if the play itself is a flawed vehicle.” He complains that “the drama at times seems almost as educational as it is theatrical . . . .”
“David Cromer’s deluxe production remains classy, absorbing entertainment,” Rooney reports. “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.”
“Clooney leans hard into the gravitas with a constantly furrowed brow,” finds the HR reviewer, “tamping down his movie-star magnetism in a vanity-free performance. It’s a creditable Broadway debut . . ., though perhaps a touch too muted to give the play the dynamic center it needs.”
The “transfer from screen to stage [of Good Night, and Good Luck] is as intense and laser-focused as the penetrating gaze coming from its star and co-writer, George Clooney,” says Frank Rizzo of Variety. “Clooney has a deeply felt command of character and a riveting presence,” Rizzo feels.
Finding virtue where other reviewers found fault, the Variety review-writer states,
But the production never veers away from the weight of its subject, themes and message. Clooney and Heslov’s taut script stays on target, resisting any expansion of a story that clocks in a speedy 100 minutes. It eschews overloading the narrative with personal backstories or psychological analysis, though an office romance lightens the mood and a colleague’s death darkens it.
Rizzo feels that
Director David Cromer . . . stages the production with that same unwavering focus on the essentials of the story, as the show’s immersive atmosphere effectively pulls the audience into the past.
The reviewer reports, “With a kind of theater vérité, Cromer fills the monochromatic bunker of a set with a large . . . and mostly male ensemble, all bustling about with myriad tasks amid overlapping dialogue and banter.
“These roles lean towards the generic,” observes Rizzo, ”but the savvy casting of veteran actors still manage to bring some character to their anonymity without drawing focus from the play’s principal mission.” He spotlights “as more significant players,” some of the same “strong performances” that other notices singled out: Glenn Fleshler as Friendly, Clark Gregg as Hollenbeck, and Paul Gross as Paley.
Rizzo ends his GNGL notice affirming that the “mind-swirling, two-minute montage of flickering film clips covering 70 years of American and broadcast history . . . packs a wallop—and so does this production.”
On Timeout.com, successor to Time Out New York, Adam Feldman says, “The Broadway version of Good Night, and Good Luck . . . is in many ways unobjectionable. It is well designed and full of fine actors doing their jobs. Its subject is timely and its message is on point, and there’s no need to see it.”
After criticizing the high price of tickets to the show, the man from TONY adds that “consumers should be warned that nothing in this production is better than what you can get at home by renting the movie for $3.99.”
That’s because, in nearly every regard, Clooney and Heslov have just plopped their screenplay onstage and called it a play. . . . The extent of the faithfulness is, at times, jaw-dropping.
In a point others also made, Feldman observes, “In the movie . . ., the camera fills in a lot of blanks . . , . That can’t happen in the same way onstage, but Clooney and Heslov have made no effort to translate those moments into language and ideas.” Cromer and the cast are left “to make the story come alive, and they do what they can.”
Clooney “acquits himself credibly” and Feldman compliments Fleshler for hit[ting] all the right notes. The Time Out reviewer also names Hudson, Glazer, Gregg, and Kranz, but dismisses “[t]he rest of the large cast [which] doesn’t do much except mill about.
Pask’s bilevel set is “excellent” and “beautifully lit by Heather Gilbert.”
Feldman sums up his experience of the play by pronouncing,
What Good Night, and Good Luck demonstrates is that the line between enjoyment and civics is blurred. Some people do want a civics lesson; tut-tutting gravely at the state of the world can make a play seem important, even when it’s just recycling. But what if that's just another form of entertainment and insulation?
The review-writer ends with a few questions:
Will this play, sincerely intended and handsomely mounted though it may be, change any minds about the downward drift of mass media in America? Or will it merely contribute to Broadway’s drift toward exorbitantly pricey events that rely on star casting? That’s the $799 [the top GNGL ticket price] question. For producers of this show, it might not matter either way. For everyone else, Good Night, and Good Luck is probably bad news.
On TheaterMania, David Gordon condemns GNGL bluntly:
Created with honorable moral intentions, Clooney and Heslov’s dramatic adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck lands at the Winter Garden Theatre without much urgency. 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.
Gordon, however, lauds the physical production, which he says “immerses us in this grayscale world at the dawn of television”:
Scott Pask and props supervisors Ray Wetmore and JR Goodman have meticulously rebuilt the CBS broadcast center at Grand Central Station, with office spaces and bullpens, control rooms and editing bays, and a stunning half-arched window that looms over the action. Brenda Abbandandolo costumes the men in the kind of vintage, to-die-for suits that we wish we could afford, while Heather Gilbert’s hanging halogen lamps provide hot studio lighting.
He complains that the “verité, quasi-documentary style worked on celluloid,” but “[i]t’s more indelicate on stage, where director David Cromer forces us to watch them on a giant floating screen that deliberately obscures the action.”
The TM reviewer finds that “beyond the production’s gorgeous aesthetic, there isn’t much to see in this tale . . . . Clooney and Heslov aren’t playwrights; they’re creatures of the silver screen who haven’t figured out how to translate this important and noble story into a different medium.”
Of the directing, Gordon asserts that “Cromer tries to keep up with the cinematic style, but the result is clumsy.”
Sections of dialogue are lost without a cinematographer showing who to look at; instead, we just have a gaggle of people talking over each other, stepping on cues. Characters come and go without much differentiation . . . .
The review-writer has the same complaint about the Hudson-Glazer subplot about the Wershbas—that it “barely registers”—that we’ve seen in other notices, and he praises Gregg’s Hollenbeck while panning Glazer’s Shirley Wershba as “dismal.” He rather dismisses the rest as a “collection of fine New York stage regulars—Fran Kranz, Christopher Denham, Will Dagger, Andrew Polk—[who] are caught in the middle, their impact fading in real time like the smoke from their ever-present cigarettes.”
Gordon concludes with the admonition that “Good Night, and Good Luck is a case study in how the best intentions don’t always translate into a compelling theater experience. As Edward R. Murrow himself said, we cannot make good news out of bad practice.”
On Deadline, Greg Evans starts his notice with a fairly definite pan:
There are moments in Good Night, and Good Luck . . . when the anti-authoritarian passions of all three men [Clooney, Heslov, and Murrow] are made very clear. . . . Unfortunately, more often than not, that clarity comes through speechifying, minor-key tirades and copious use of ’50s-era TV clips that make plain the all-too-obvious parallels between then and now.
Evans pronounces “Good Night, and Good Luck . . . too knowing or too winking by half to seem like anything other than rather uninspired agitprop.”
Despite the fact that the Deadline reviewer finds that “Clooney somehow seems smaller, more contained than he does even on smaller, more contained screens,” he reports “that the large cast—Clooney most definitely included—offer up rock-solid performances even though they, like Clooney’s outsize charm, too often get swallowed up in Scott Pask’s large, busy TV studio set design.”
“Pask,” Evans declares, “like video/projection designer David Bengali and director Cromer are among Broadway’s elite, most dependable creative teams, but even they seem undone by a plodding play that truly comes alive in fits and spurts.”
Howard Miller’s notice on Talkin’ Broadway is arguably the most positive of this whole sampling, seeing GNGL “both as a sober salute to Murrow and, less successfully, as a bully pulpit for Mr. Clooney, its co-writer and star.” He affirms:
As directed by David Cromer, the play generally sticks to the facts (including lots of video clips of the actual persons being depicted), even as it keeps Murrow at the center. For the most part, Good Night, and Good Luck plays out under the assumption that the audience is smart enough to follow the storyline without being spoon-fed . . . .
“Throughout, the tone is generally that of a straight-forward documentary play.”
In contrast with most of his colleagues, Miller writes, “We may not know much about many of the characters who buzz around the TV studio (the vast, two-level, businesslike and industrial-looking facility was designed by Scott Pask), but we are quite able to get the gist of who they are.” He proceeds to single out two of the same actors for praise as those colleagues, however: Fleshler and Gross.
As for Clooney, the reviewer says he “manages, at least until the final minutes of the production, to come off as a team player (all right, the captain of a team).” Clooney “generally is there to serve the play and his character,” reports Miller. “Applause is periodically earned, and not milked . . . .”
Miller’s one negative note, aligning with many of the other reviews, is that final video montage, of which he says:
This is perhaps meant to reinforce the message that the repressive and fear-mongering events being depicted in the play are not just an aberration, a blip in history, but something we need to continue to be on the watch for and be prepared to fight. The thing is, everything that preceded this makes the point abundantly clear. . . . [A]fter the grown-up approach to relating the story through the first 90 minutes of the 100-minute intermissionless play, this additional material feels unnecessarily pedantic.
[In my afterword to Part 2 of “Film Stars Twinkle,” I made some personal remarks regarding my recollection of newsman Edward R. Murrow. There’s a tenuous family connection, so I’m going to recycle my comments.
[I’m old enough to remember Murrow, however vaguely: Murrow died when I was over 18, so I knew the name and the renown. I vaguely remember seeing him on television when I was a boy. See It Now was on from 1951 to 1958, when I was between 4 and 11. It was a news show, so I wouldn’t have been watching it for most of its run, but maybe by the time I was 10, I might have watched it when it ran on Sunday evenings at 5, but probably not often. The McCarthy shows would have been beyond me (though I do remember being aware of the turmoil of those years). I was only 7 when the 9 March 1954 showdown aired, and 10 when McCarthy died.
[On the other hand, Person to Person, Murrow’s entertainment show, ran from 1953 to 1961, when I was between 6 and 14, and I’m pretty sure I watched some of the later shows when Murrow would send cameras into the homes of celebrities. I sort of remember watching some of the personalities from Hollywood and other fields—such as Liberace, a clip of whose segment is featured in the play and the 60 Minutes report, in 1956 (when I was 9) and Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows in 1955 and ’60 (when I was 8 and three days shy of 14)—as they sat in their living rooms while Murrow, back at the studio, chatted with them.
[My circumstances may have made me a little more cognizant of some events than other children. First, I lived in Washington, D.C. National and international news was often local to us. Second, I had schoolmates who were in the life, so to speak: the sons of the ambassadors from pre-Castro Cuba and India, the grandson of General George S. Patton, Jr. (1885-1945), and the daughters of Vice President Richard Nixon (1913-94; 36th Vice President of the United States: 1953-61; 37th President of the United States: 1969-74). Nixon ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1960, when I was in 8th grade and his daughters were in 7th and 9th grades at the same school.
[(There are anecdotes revealing my connection with the Cuban ambassador’s son in “Gres Gallery, Part 2” [10 July 2018] and General Patton’s grandson in “A Confluence of Coincidences” [29 January 2015].)
[Then there was that “family connection”: Murrow was my dad's first boss at the U.S. Information Agency back in the early 1960s. (I’ve blogged about that time of my life in “An American Teen in Germany” [9 and 12 March 2013].)
[I’ve told the story of my father taking up President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to “ask what you can do for your country” in his inaugural address in 1961. Dad was a great admirer of Kennedy (1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63), and that call inspired him to give up his good civilian job to work for the government.
[At the same time, Dad, a newspaper reporter before he was drafted just prior to the U.S. entrance into World War II, respected Murrow both for his wartime reporting—Dad was an artillery officer in France and western Germany in the last months of the war where he almost certainly heard Murrow’s reports over the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS)—and his See It Now reports in the ’50s.
[JFK appointed Murrow Director of USIA on 21 March 1961 and Dad applied on 1 May—when he was 42. He went on active service as a Foreign Service Officer on 9 July ’62. I have no idea if the two ever actually met, though I assume the director addressed the FSO’s-to-be sometime during their training. Murrow was the first director of USIA under whom Dad served.
[Dad went overseas in September 1962 and didn’t return to the States until he took emergency leave sometime in September 1963, when his father suffered a stroke and later died. Murrow resigned from USIA in January ’64 due to illness and died of lung cancer in April '65. (Dad served until 1968 under two successors to Murrow: Carl Rowan [1925-2000; 5th Director of the United States Information Agency: 1964-65], a well-known journalist, and Leonard Marks [1916-2006; 6th Director of the United States Information Agency: 1965-68], a communications lawyer.)
[I never specifically spoke to Dad about serving under Murrow, so I don’t know for certain how he felt about the association. But I was 15 when Dad joined USIA, and I recall feeling a certain pride that my father was working for Edward R. Murrow, an esteemed newsman.]
