Good Night, and Good Luck Broadway Reviews

*CRITICS PICK* 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... Clooney performs them with wit, integrity and charming modesty.

Irrespective of the strengths and weaknesses of Good Night, and Good Luck as theater, the personal commitment of Clooney, whose father is a former anchorman, seems heartfelt and impassioned. There’s no doubting the sincerity of his belief that this dark chapter of American history has something vital to impart to us in 2025.

Movie star he may be, and flashy ticket Good Night, and Good Luck is, but there’s no arguing with his or the project’s sincerity, even its sense of duty... Clooney and his collaborators give a dignified and resonant answer.

But for those who saw the movie—I assume a considerable portion of the audience—the theatrical version offers little that’s fresh, or even more fully fleshed out... The production never breaks free of the source material to become a captivating or original theatrical event.

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.

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.

“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.

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.’)

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.

There’s something smugly satisfied about the whole exercise, which ultimately talks down to its audience and assumes we can’t connect the dots. Good Night, and Good Luck aims to be a hard-hitting story about accountability and checks on power, but all that ever comes through is dead air.

There’s an echo quality to the stage version – imitative, resonant but hollower than the original. That’s partly an issue of medium... what the staging delivers in newsroom cacophony, it loses in nuance, character and the entrancing mood of momentous defiance.

Cromer has taken a mostly prosaic, procedural media drama... and turned it into something that scorches with the heat of today’s political turmoil.

It’s unnecessary and obvious; shoveling textureless meaning into the troth.

More importantly, though, it’s a solid evening of theater. Yes, perhaps it’s a less-than-dramatic one -- unless you’ve never seen the movie or don’t know your 1950s history -- but it remains eminently watchable as it recounts Murrow’s crusade to take down Wisconsin’s junior senator, Joseph McCarthy, through his news program 'See It Now.'

As for the play itself, this is a story of 20th century media, egregious government overreach and speaking truth to power. In a way, it is both timely and yet an outdated product of the past—a dichotomy I could not shake.

The message still comes through loud and clear in Clooney’s 2005 film. All too often, the stage version feels like a noble but unnecessary repeat.

What was galvanizing onscreen is curiously lifeless onstage, its airless quality not helped by the lackluster staging from the normally superb David Cromer. Despite running a mere 90 intermission-less minutes, the play feels much longer...

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.

At the Winter Garden Theatre, the production directed by David Cromer (The Band’s Visit) is earnest and movie-star handsome (thanks to great work by set designer Scott Pask), but unexciting. It simply fails to catch fire, save for all the cigarettes.

Clooney is fine in the role, though it’s hard to dazzlingly play someone who’s so right so much of the time... The main star of the show, it turns out, is the set, by Tony-winner Scott Pask, a period-flavored marvel.