One of the most meticulously textured, three-dimensional period sets on Broadway this season might instead have been conjured in two dimensions, on glowing screens.
In the script to “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s stage adaptation of their 2005 movie of the same name, the authors envisioned a set using LED panels throughout.
But the play’s Tony Award-winning director, David Cromer, had other ideas for recreating the 1950s broadcast world of CBS and Edward R. Murrow, the anchor of its news program “See It Now.”
“They were sort of suggesting it, thought it might be cool,” Cromer said. “And I said, ‘Let’s do it the hard way.’”
So he enlisted Scott Pask, an architecturally trained set designer and three-time Tony winner, to take on the challenge at the capacious Winter Garden Theater.
Starring the Tony-nominated Clooney as Murrow in his face-off with the crusading Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the show is one of this spring’s priciest tickets. (Its penultimate performance, this Saturday night, will be broadcast live on CNN and livestreamed on CNN.com.)
Pask’s set, which earned him another Tony nomination, is the container for it all — as in this photograph, which captures the April 6, 1954, broadcast of “See It Now” on which McCarthy, shown in archival footage, responds to Murrow’s on-air indictment of him. Studio monitors catch Murrow and his producer, Fred Friendly (Glenn Fleshler), listening, while their director, Don Hewitt (Will Dagger), sits just downstage. Overlooking the midcentury Manhattan tableau is one of the distinctive arched windows of Grand Central Terminal, because that’s where the real studio was, upstairs.
To tell this story each night at the 1,537-seat theater, the creative team had many details to consider, including ensuring that the audience didn’t lose sight of Clooney. “If someone misses him for a beat,” Pask said, “it’s only for a second.”
James Estrin is a photographer and writer who has been with The Times since 1992.
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