‘Good Night, and Good Luck’
Rent or buy on Prime Video or Fandango at Home.
When George Clooney’s show, revolving around the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow, livestreamed on CNN on June 7, you could say that the news made the news. Broadcasting a Broadway production live hardly ever happens, to say the least. Luckily, “Good Night, and Good Luck” is now available on demand, if you were otherwise engaged on that summer night, or missed the stage run.
In this adaptation, written with Grant Heslov, from his own film from 2005, Clooney portrays Murrow at a fraught time in 1953, when the reporter took a principled stand against Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s paranoia-infused anti-communist investigations. While Murrow is the story’s grimly stern heart and soul, David Cromer’s stylish production (smoothly captured by Micah Bickham) feels like a true ensemble piece. Fun fact: Clooney was not new to the live-broadcast experience — in 2000, he was in the Cold War drama “Fail Safe,” which aired live on CBS and is available on various platforms.
‘The Shark Is Broken’
Stream it on BroadwayHD.
In Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws,” the shark hunter Quint, portrayed by Robert Shaw, ranked right below the toothy killing machine in terms of obsessive intensity. Nearly 50 years later, Ian Shaw revisited that highlight of his father’s career in “The Shark Is Broken.”
Starting Oct. 16, you can stream a capture of the play, which Ian Shaw wrote with Joseph Nixon, and was recorded during a spring tour of Britain and Ireland. (A production ran on Broadway in 2023.)
The show is essentially a backstage comedy taking place on the movie’s set. Ian Shaw portrays his hard-drinking father, Robert, who kills time with his co-stars Roy Scheider (Dan Fredenburgh) and Richard Dreyfuss (Ashley Margolis) on the boat Orca in between repairs to the faulty mechanical sharks they are supposed to act against. All told, this is a pretty entertaining way to watch a son honor his dad, and maybe settle a few accounts.
‘Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes’
Listen on Audible.
Hugh Jackman’s enviable biceps and chiseled jaw may have played a teeny part in making him a star, so curious minds will want to know: How does he fare in an audio production? In this particular new release from Audible, at least, Jackman is superb — which is especially crucial because his character handles much of the narrative heavy lifting.
The production had a stage life at the Minetta Lane Theater this spring, when Jesse Green praised Hannah Moscovitch’s “terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play” in The New York Times. The story of an affair between a novelist-turned-college-professor (Jackman) and one of his students (Ella Beatty) is told almost entirely from his perspective, until a late twist makes you reconsider everything that preceded. Conveniently, now you can just start back from the beginning and check out the clues you might have missed.
‘Phantom of the Opera’
Stream it at N.Y.U. Skirball.
A couple of years ago, the maestro of digital live theater Joshua William Gelb staged and livestreamed a creepily effective “Nosferatu: A 3D Symphony of Horror” from inside his apartment. The show, which you can watch for free on YouTube, put the evocative power of sound design to spooky good use. From Oct. 23 to Nov. 3, Gelb and his Theater in Quarantine company return with another Halloween-appropriate live production, once again in partnership with N.Y.U. Skirball: a retelling of “Phantom of the Opera” created with Normandy Sherwood. Because Theater in Quarantine likes to challenge itself, this production will allow viewers to toggle between the performance and, as Gelb put it, “a phantom’s eye view of how we make digital magic.”
‘Bus Stop’
Stream it on YouTube.
William Inge’s “Bus Stop,” from 1955, is a bittersweet, wonderfully evocative snapshot of loneliness and the need for connection that takes place in a Kansas diner, where bus passengers are marooned by a storm. A film adaptation starring Marilyn Monroe had its charms, but it took liberties with the story and rounded out some of its sharper angles.
In this HBO broadcast from 1982, a touching, vulnerable Margot Kidder takes on the Monroe role of Cherie, whose singing skills don’t quite match her nightclub ambitions, and she is well paired with Tim Matheson as a smitten, rough-around-the-edges cowboy. While the picture quality of this YouTube upload isn’t optimal, the ensemble cast makes up for it, a rogue’s gallery of terrific character actors, led by Joyce Van Patten as the diner’s owner and Pat Hingle as a smooth-talking lech who was cut from the movie.
The post George Clooney in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ and More Theater to Stream appeared first on New York Times.
