Hollywood icon George Clooney makes his Broadway debut in Good Night, and Good Luck at the historic Winter Garden Theatre. The play dramatizes the real-life conflict between legendary newsman Edward. R Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy in a full-throated defense of a free press. Read the reviews!
The cast also includes 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 S. Paley, Georgia Heers as Ella, Carter Hudson as Joe Wershba, Fran Kranz as Palmer Williams, Jennifer Morris as Millie Green, Michael Nathanson as Eddie Scott, Andrew Polk as Charlie Mack, Aaron Roman Weiner as Don Surine with R. Ward Duffy, Joe Forbrich, Imani Rousselle, Greg Stuhr, JD Taylor, and Sophia Tzougros rounding out the ensemble.
The creative team for Good Night, and Good Luck includes Tony Award winner Scott Pask (scenic design), Heather Gilbert (lighting design), David Bengali (video/projections design), Daniel Kluger (sound design), Brenda Abbandandolo (costume design), Leah J. Loukas (hair & wig design), Gigi Buffington (voice & dialect), Daniel Kluger and Bryan Carter (music supervision), and David Caparelliotis (Casting Director).
In Good Night, and Good Luck, we tune in to the golden age of broadcast journalism and Edward R. Murrow’s legendary, history-altering, on-air showdown with Senator Joseph McCarthy. As McCarthyism casts a shadow over America, Murrow and his news team choose to confront the growing tide of paranoia and propaganda, even if it means turning the federal government and a worried nation against them. The play chronicles a time in American history when truth and journalistic integrity stood up to fearmongering and disinformation—and won.
Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: Good Night, and Good Luck promises the familiar: What you’ve seen is what you get. It is selling nostalgia for the solemn journalistic ethics of men like Murrow, and perhaps also for the old-fashioned type of stoic and handsome leading man that George Clooney represents; the show’s publicity photos are even, like the film, in black and white. Onstage, the characters don’t have much more color. 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 feelings into language and gesture.
Matt Windman, amNY: “Good Night, and Good Luck” is both a tribute and a reckoning—a stylish, sobering reminder of journalism’s power and the price of using it. With Clooney’s quiet strength at the center and Cromer’s riveting stagecraft all around him, this production looks to the past but refuses to stay there. The message is clear: if no one stands up, history isn’t just doomed to repeat—it already is.
Greg Evans, Deadline: Good Night, and Good Luck certainly doesn’t lack point of view or conviction, but neither of those things can do much with an overly familiar story, a lack of subtlety and an odd tone of understatement that extends to everything from the writing to Clooney’s performance.
David Finkle, New York Stage Review: Another way of describing the Clooney-Heslov Good Night, and Good Luck strategy is its use as a metaphor for the Trump era. Perhaps 40 minutes into the work, the audience is aware of which American event is being relived but also fully aware of what’s being implied about the troubled present. Auditorium-wide guffaws and grateful applause accumulate. (The only current reference missing are the words ‘fake news.’)
Dalton Ross, Entertainment Weekly: The original’s focus on the unchecked power of an elected official using fear, rumor, and lies against his enemies obviously hits even harder in 2025… But another theme lightly touched on in the movie — the future role of television in our society — gets even greater emphasis on the stage.
Average Rating:
66.0%
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