Where is our Edward R. Murrow?

That is the implicit question that animates George Clooney’s play, opened tonight on Broadway in an elegant, meticulous and timely production directed by David Cromer, which dramatizes how Murrow, the veteran CBS journalist, stood up to a demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy. 

“Good Night, and Good Luck” is a stage adaptation of the black-and-white movie of the same name that Clooney co-wrote and directed in 2005, with Clooney this time starring as Murrow. (In the movie, he portrayed Murrow’s producer Fred Friendly.) It offers the same story as the film – how Murrow and his team on the news program “See It Now” broadcast an exposé of McCarthy’s corrupt and fraudulent methods for rooting out supposed Communists in the government, and then fought back when McCarthy attacked him.  The scenes and subplots are much the same, and most of the lines in the play are reproduced verbatim from the film, many of which come from actual speeches and other historical records. As in the film, the production also makes extensive use of archival footage from Murrow’s broadcasts and from Senate hearings (as well as muted television commercials from the era), projected on screens and banks of monitors placed throughout the set of a TV news studio on stage at the Winter Garden.

If there’s not much change in content, “Good Night, and Good Luck” is transformed by its context. On the night I attended, the audience treated the play like the gathering of the like-minded at a public square, responding to this real-life drama from the 1950s as if a comment on life in America under Donald Trump. 

“I wake up in the morning, and I don’t recognize anything. I feel like I went to sleep three years ago, and somebody hijacked…as if all reasonable people took a plane to Europe and left us behind,” one character says, to laughter and applause. It’s just one of the several moments in the play that elicited a sustained reaction of recognition — applause, laughter, audible gasps and even, once, a loud collective “whoa.”

The production seems designed to make us wonder: Is there a modern-day version of Murrow,  an influential public figure brave enough to speak out for truth and fairness in the face of widespread fear, misinformation and intimidation?  The question feels like the flip side of the one that Donald Trump asked in his first term: ”Where’s my Roy Cohn?”  He was referring to his former personal lawyer and fixer, and expressing his desire for government officials to serve his personal interests. Before Roy Cohn became Trump’s lawyer, he had been Senator McCarthy’s top aide. The real Cohn makes appearances in the play, in footage of him at McCarthy hearings – a sly signal of the story’s current relevance.  Eventually, a montage of images – the final image in particular — intentionally thrusts us much more overtly into the here and now. 

The analogy between McCarthyism and Trumpism is not precise, but it’s not facile, and George Clooney is not the only one making it. (“Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets,” The Guardian, March 30, 2025)

“Good Night, and Good Luck” tries to capture the fearful and repressive atmosphere of the early 1950s. One subplot involves Joe Wershba (Carter Hudson) and Shirley Wershba (Ilana Glazer) worried about their careers at the network, not just because CBS was demanding that employees sign loyalty oaths; the couple was hiding their marriage because of a CBS policy against employees dating one another.

The production attempts to recreate the feel of the era in other ways as well, aided by a design team that’s done its homework.

There are the rhythms of early network television news, with its confusing moments of energetic milling-about suddenly punctuated by the focused clarity of going “on air,” which plays out persuasively in Scott Pask’s simultaneously cavernous and claustrophobic-feeling set.

The production is also wreathed in a 50s kind of cool. Some half dozen musical numbers are inserted between the scenes in the TV studio, performed on a raised stage by a jazz singer named Ella (Georgia Heers) and a backup band. The songs sometimes underscore what’s just happened or about to happen to subtly comic effect: Right after Murrow and his team decide to do a program using McCarthy’s own words to take him down, the Ella sings “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” (“There is trouble ahead….”)

Under Cromer’s direction,  the large cast of characters, most of whom are portraying  real-life individuals by name, exhibit the slicked-back hair and relentless smoking that recalls the ambivalent nostalgia of the “Mad Men” TV series (which, having ended ten years ago, is itself now relegated to nostalgia.)

There are less-than-appealing 50s attitudes touched on as well, although toned down. Murrow alternated his serious news program “See It Now,” with a celebrity interview series “Person to Person,” that had more viewers and sponsors, but that he only tolerated because he was able to use its popularity as leverage for his serious journalism. As if to emphasize how frivolous he (and perhaps Clooney?) found the series, the one celebrity we see Clooney interview is the pianist Liberace. (Clooney as Murrow sits in front of a projection of the actual archive footage of Liberace.) The play does leave out the snarkier footage used in the film, in which Morrow asks Liberace if he’s given any thought to marriage, with Liberace answering yes he’s given a lot of thought to it, but he’s waiting to meet “the perfect mate.” 

The CBS journalists are sophisticated men (and a few women) who engage in low-key banter. None are smoother than Murrow, whom Clooney, making his Broadway debut, portrays with a suave understatement that may well have been Murrow’s signature style, but is certainly Clooney’s.

This laid-back tone could help make more palatable some of Murrow’s more righteous comments, both in his broadcasts, and in his speech (which brackets the play) to the 1958 annual meeting of the Radio and Television News Directors Association.  Murrow makes pronouncements about the impact of television –warning against the medium being used just to “entertain, amuse and insulate,” rather than teach, illuminate and inspire – that now sound more quaint (and pompous) than prescient. Clooney, the son of a local TV journalist, might have been drawn to Murrow’s story initially as much for its illustration of the early promise of television as for its playbook against would-be authoritarians. (The title of the play is the sign-off Murrow used at the end of his program, a common practice among anchors to this day.) But the times have made the TV aspects feel largely beside the point.

Yes, the audience may still experience a momentary Fox-related frisson when William Paley, the owner of CBS, (portrayed by Paul Gross, best known to theater lovers for “Slings and Arrows”) warns Murrow: “Now you’ve opened the door: News with a dash of commentary. What happens when it isn’t Edward R. Murrow minding the store?”

But there is far more resonance when Murrow rebuts McCarthy’s methods and his morals. ”We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason… The actions of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault dear Brutus is not in our stars but in ourselves.’’

Good Night, and Good Luck
Winter Garden Theater through June 8
Running time: 100 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $176 – $799. Digital lottery and rush: $49. Standing room: $69 (only after the show is sold out)
Written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov; Based on the film 
Directed by David Cromer
Music composed, orchestrated, arranged and directed by Bryan Carter
Scenic Design by Scott Pask; Costume Design by Brenda Abbandandolo; Lighting Design by Heather Gilbert; Sound Design by Daniel Kluger; Projection Design by David Bengali; Hair and Wig Design by Leah J. Loukas;  voice and dialect by Gigi Buffington
Cast: George Clooney as Edward  R. Murrow, Mac Brandt as Colonel Anderson, Will Dagger as Don Hewitt, Christopher Denham as John Aaron, Glenn Fleshler as Fred Friendly, Ilana Glazer as Shirley Wershba, Clark Gregg as Don Hollenbeck, Paul Gross as William F. Paley, Georgia Heers as Ella, Carter Hudson as Joe Wershba, Fran Kranz as Palmer Williams, Jennifer Morris as Mili Lerner, Michael Nathanson as Eddie Scott, Andrew Polk as Charlie Mack, Aaron Roman Weiner as Don Surine, Greg Stuhr as Phil from Legal, with R. Ward Duffy, Joe Forbrich,  Imani Rousselle, JD Taylor, and Sophia Tzougros rounding out the ensemble.   
Photos by Emilio Madrid