Review: Clooney, Fair and Balanced, in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’

“This just might do nobody any good” is a chancy first line for a play.

Or maybe not too chancy at that, when the man who delivers it is George Clooney, and the man he’s portraying is Edward R. Murrow. This is, after all, Broadway, where glossy demigods of the left are loved.

Still, Clooney has never previously appeared on its stages — “so … buckle up,” he writes in his bio.

That Murrow has him beat in that regard, having appeared as a character in a musical called “Senator Joe,” is not surprising. He was, after all, a world-famous journalist whose first name might as well have been “crusading.” As “Good Night, and Good Luck” begins, what he’s crusading for, in a speech to news directors, is a complete rethink of television, which in choosing to “distract, delude, amuse and insulate” is making Americans “fat, comfortable and complacent.”

That’s in 1958. Looking at the diminished state of television news today, you’d have to conclude he was right: His speech did nobody any good.

But his journalism is another story, and that’s the one “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden, wants to tell. To do so, it quickly jumps back to 1953 and into CBS’s Studio 41, where Murrow and his producer, Fred W. Friendly, run the small empire that creates the newsmagazine “See It Now.” They are about to embark on a series of broadcasts designed to unmask, and thus destroy, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Communist-witch-hunting demagogue. Amazingly, they succeed.

That they did not succeed alone — many other factors and forces were involved — is not the play’s concern. The script, by Clooney and Grant Heslov, closely following their screenplay for Clooney’s 2005 film, is not a history lesson. (If it were, it might mention some ambiguities in the evidence.) Nor is it a drama in the conventional sense, with complex motives, imperfect heroes and shattering confrontations. Rather it is a slender, swift and healthy exercise in hagiography, burnishing its saints and martyrs to a high sheen.

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. (And in case you miss him onstage, his mug is relayed by the projection designer David Bengali to banks of black-and-white monitors along the proscenium.) Though much of the role consists of verbatim passages from Murrow’s actual telecasts, including mortifying, obviously prepped interviews with the likes of Liberace, Clooney performs them with wit, integrity and charming modesty.

That modesty allows us to think, for a while, that the real star here is the ensemble. Though Murrow and Friendly (Glenn Fleshler, terrific) make the decisions — usually to the dismay of the CBS president, William S. Paley (Paul Gross, likewise) — the many “See It Now” writers, cameramen, editors, directors and assistants are often in the foreground. Cromer moves them around like a corps de ballet without a soloist, in shifting groupings and sudden massings.

But with no time to offer more than quick sketches, the script gives them just a trait or two each. The writers Joe and Shirley Wershba (Carter Hudson and Ilana Glazer) are secretly married. The director Don Hewitt (Will Dagger) is adenoidal and anxious. The production manager Palmer Williams (Fran Kranz) has a problematic ex-wife. At least they are luckier than Phil from Legal, who doesn’t even get a last name. Still, 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.

Enhancing that feeling (if also diffusing the focus) are a series of interstitial songs performed by Georgia Heers and a four-man combo on an elevated platform representing a nearby studio. Carefully selected pop standards like “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” and “How High the Moon” provide pleasure and respite while slyly commenting on the action. After the broadcast of Oct. 20, 1953, about a reservist expelled from the Air Force because family members were found to have read “subversive” newspapers, Heers sings Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got My Eyes on You” seductively. The more seductive it is, the more we understand the dangers of the surveillance society.

How Murrow and Friendly persevere in their investigation, despite the senator’s threats on one hand and the loss of the aluminum company Alcoa as a sponsor on the other, is the play’s main interest. But what strikes me as heroic is less their effort to appease CBS — they buy the ad time Alcoa abandons — than their struggle to define and maintain journalistic fairness in the face of outrageous lies from government officials. Answering Paley, who fears the rise of commentary as a substitute for news, Murrow says, “I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument.”

And yet in “Good Night, and Good Luck” — the title is taken from Murrow’s sign-off — Murrow comes off as a model of effective restraint, easily threading the needle of a debate that continues today. Though the Air Force’s case against the reservist sounds trumped up, Murrow merely says, “We do not know.” (The man was reinstated a month after the episode.) The main broadside against McCarthy, aired on March 9, 1954, consists almost entirely of the senator’s own words from recordings and transcripts of speeches and congressional hearings. Even so, “See It Now” gives him an entire episode to respond, during which he falsely asserts that Murrow has been on the Soviet payroll for decades. Murrow’s follow-up, a week later, is a classic just-the-facts takedown.

Of course, as we know, McCarthy got what he deserved: He was censured by the Senate that December, becoming a pariah and dying in office. Murrow got what he deserved, too: secular sainthood.

But I mentioned martyrs, and there is one in the play: Don Hollenbeck, a CBS colleague hounded mercilessly by McCarthy surrogates. Whether his fate was tied to that hounding — well, to quote Murrow, we do not know. But the play makes the case, in the way plays do, by giving an excellent actor (Clark Gregg) big emotions to play.

I wish “Good Night, and Good Luck” were more often so subjective. Instead, influenced by Murrow’s example, it keeps things mostly cool and concrete. (McCarthy is not played by an actor but by himself on tape, leaving no room for editorializing.) 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.

Yet preaching to the converted can be a good role for theater. So is rousing the demoralized with the example of heroes who have prevailed. Clooney’s refusal to grandstand as an actor allows his Murrow to maintain his halo. These things were possible, the play seems to say; they can be again. No matter that with only three networks and enormous national viewership, the television news of Murrow’s day was much more influential than it is in ours. “Good Night, and Good Luck” is a powerful and useful reminder that a demigod, or maybe it takes many whose names we don’t know, can still sometimes bring down a devil.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Through June 8 at the Winter Garden, Manhattan; goodnightgoodluckbroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

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