George Clooney really understood the meaning of “Go big or go home” last night.
Clooney’s $900 a ticket Broadway debut in “Good Night and Good Luck” really paid off. His star turn as crusading CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow is getting praise.
The opening night at Broadway’s massively big Winter Garden Theater brought out an A list crowd in formal attire that theater denizens will be talking about for years to come.
There was even an A list crowd that featured an “ER” reunion with Anthony Edwards, Juliana Margulies, and Noah Wyle.
The theater was so packed with stars that business partner Rande Gerber and his wife, Cindy Crawford, and their daughter Kaia Gerber had to sit in the first mezzanine.
(Not everyone dug the show, though: for some reason, Drew Barrymore, who was sitting two seats away from me, skipped out after 20 minutes. Go figure.)
Hugh Jackman was there, along with Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan, Uma Thurman, Richard Kind, legendary comedian Robert Klein, Kylie Minogue, Pierce Brosnan and Kelly Shaye Smith. and tons of media stars like Lesley Stahl, Chris Wallace, George Stephanopolous and Alexandra Wentworth, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, Stephanie Ruhle, Willie Geist, Graydon Carter, Gayle King, and of course, a jaw dropping Jennifer Lopez, who’s made overdressing for Broadway a new standard. (How do the people around her concentrate on the show?)
No sign, however, of Clooney’s wife, Amal. And Clooney pal Julia Roberts came on the night before with husband and son. They probably wanted to stay out of the star studded scrum. (It was a word I heard a lot last night.)
There was an overwhelmingly giltzy party that followed at the New York Public Library, the same place where Clooney apparently had a huge charity party last year. He knows to paint the town red!
Ironically, “red” was a theme last night politically, too, as “Good Night and Good Luck” — which Clooney wrote and produced with Grant Heslov — concerns the 1950s terrorizing of the press and the public by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy’s counsel on the infamous House Unamerican Activities Committee was the nefarious Roy Cohn, mentor in later years to Donald Trump.
Is the picture getting clearer? The play — like the Clooney and Heslov movie it’s based on — is more timely than ever as Trump, using the Cohn and McCarthy playbook, threatens the very existence of press freedoms. Murrow and his team at CBS Radio, circa 1954, bravely confronted these evil men whose goal was to destroy everything around them.
Director David Cromer and production designer Scott Pask light up the stage with an enormous set inspired by CBS Radio’s studio above Grand Central Station a looming art deco backdrop, and the unique positioning of a 50s jazz singer and band stationed above the action to give the feel of the moment in time. (Georgia Heers, named Ella after Ella Fitzgerald, is a welcome counterpoint, with her buttery voice. She and “Maybe Happy Ending” singer Dez Duronn need their own category at the Tony Awards this year.) With Clooney and Heslov they use real black and white video clips from the era — especially of McCarthy– that punctuate the Senator’s sinister attacks.
Carter Hudson and Ilana Glazer are standouts as secretly married producer couple Joe and Shirley Wershba — who I was lucky enough to know 30 years later in the 1980s, Glenn Fleshler, of “Billions” is CBS’s Fred Friendly, Clark Gregg is Don Hollenbeck, a tragic figure, and Fran Kranz is Palmer Willliams. They are all top notch as Murrow’s Olympic team of journalists.
Clooney, with his dyed black hair and hang dog comportment, told me that he was scared of making his Broadway debut at 63. But when he steps on stage in character to a dais at a 1958 radio convention to deliver the first of several monologues, you can tell he has “it.” There’s no denying his star power, or his investment in the character of Murrow, whom David Straithairn played in the movie. This was a daring pivot for the movie and TV star, and the gamble paid off.
Clark Gregg gets the line of the night as on the ropes Hollenbeck, who’s been branded a “pinko” and is suffering the heat of being branded a Communist.(He eventually committed suicide.) In a line added to the play, Hollenbeck says to Murrow as the hateful McCarthy pursues him: “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.”
The audience bursts into applause, because that’s the way it feels now as Trump and Elon Musk take a chainsaw to the foundations of finance and culture. Cromer ends the play with a stunning montage of clips trying the past to the present. As Rachel Maddow said to me before the play even began — but after a long day of chaos in the real word — “we are in deep trouble.” We were then, too, in 1954, but we survived it. “Good Night and Good Luck” is assurance we’ll survive this, too.
One last thing: Michael J. Fox is nothing short of a miracle. So is Pollan. Michael was in his tuxedo, pushed in a wheelchair. We can’t imagine the effort that goes into the day to day living. He is a shining star for everyone dealing with Parkinson’s. Absolutely stunning, both of them!
