Good Night, and Good Luck, will play its final performance at the Winter Garden Theatre on June 8. The June 7 performance will be simulcast live on CNN from Broadway.
By Elazar Abrahams
This Saturday night, CNN will air the recent Broadway production of Good Night, and Good Luck, starring George Clooney, live on its network. It’s a great gesture, one that makes theater more accessible and brings a timely political story to a mass audience for free. I’m genuinely glad this is happening. But having seen the play live on Broadway two months ago, I can also say, with some disappointment, that this particular production didn’t live up to its potential.
The subject matter could not be more compelling. Good Night, and Good Luck dramatizes CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow’s televised takedown of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the height of America’s Red Scare in the 1950s, a moment of courage and moral clarity that still resonates today. I’m fascinated by this chapter of American history. I went into the theater excited to see it brought to life. And with George Clooney on stage in the Murrow role, it seemed like a can’t-miss proposition.
It missed.
The play, adapted from the 2005 film Clooney directed, is a flat, inert staging of material that should feel electric. The dialogue rarely sparks. The tension is diluted. For long stretches, it feels like a bunch of boring nothing, with the historical stakes never coming alive. It was undeniably cool to see Clooney in person, but even his star power couldn’t elevate what was, frankly, a very dull evening of theater.
Part of the problem is structural. Much of the play has Clooney acting opposite pre-recorded footage, real historical clips of figures like McCarthy. Watching him interact with a screen for large portions of the show is simply not exciting. The other cast members, including Ilana Glazer, have surprisingly little to do. The production leans too hard on Clooney’s presence and the power of archival footage, without giving the stage version its own dramatic life.
All of this makes it even wilder that this is now the highest grossing play in Broadway history. Tickets were exorbitantly priced, driven by Clooney’s star power. And yet what audiences got for those prices was largely an exercise in watching a great actor perform a subpar script against a video screen.
That said, the ending did hit home. The play closes with a montage of modern news footage, drawing a direct line from Murrow’s era to the media battles of today. It’s blunt, pointedly anti-Trump, and incredibly effective. Watching that final sequence, I felt the urgency the rest of the show had failed to deliver. The world, as Tim Robinson might say, is so “f**king f**ked up.” The montage captured that in a way the preceding scenes had not.
So while I cannot recommend the play itself, I do think the idea of airing it on CNN is a good one. Broadway is expensive and exclusionary. A televised version brings this story, and this moment in history, to a wider audience who might not otherwise engage with it. And maybe, in a different format, framed as a live television event, not a sluggish stage drama, the material will land better on screen.
It’s a fascinating experiment, even if the play didn’t quite succeed. I hope networks continue trying things like this. Theater deserves to be seen by more people. Just next time, let’s hope the show is worthy of the platform.
TV and City 