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Senator Joseph McCarthy

Good Night, and Good Luck.

April 7, 2025

If only film star George Clooney and his co-script writer Grant Heslov had hired an actual playwright to adapt their acclaimed screenplay for the 2005 film "Good Night, and Good Luck." for the Broadway stage. What worked in close up in the film does not have the same effect on the huge stage of the Winter Garden Theatre. And while David Strathairn as Edward R Murrow in the film, the role now played by Clooney on Broadway, also seemed wooden and unemotional, his every flicker of emotion on his face was telegraphed through the extreme close ups of every frame. With its cast of 22 on a huge CBS studio set, most of the characters are undefined or unidentified. At times it is difficult to know who is talking or where their voices are coming from on the multileveled setting. [more]

The Crucible

April 20, 2016

Van Hove sets his version in a modern classroom. When the curtain goes up we first see the girls who will later accuse various people in Salem, Massachusetts, of having bewitched them, seated at desks and singing in unison. The curtain descends and then the play begins with Miller’s first scene. Puritan Reverend Samuel Parris has caught his daughter, his niece Abigail Williams, his black servant Tituba, and other girls in the community dancing in the forest around a cauldron, all forbidden behaviors. On seeing him, his daughter Betty has become catatonic. When expert witch hunter Reverend Hale, who has been sent for, questions Tituba, she confesses to communing with the devil, an idea he plants in her mind. [more]