Stage-to-screen review: Good Night, and Good Luck

Former Golden Girls guest star George Clooney made his Broadway debut last year in Good Night, and Good Luck, an adaptation of one of his own films from twenty years earlier. One performance was broadcast live on CNN of all places, and that recording has now been added with very little fanfare to Netflix in the UK - possibly to make sure everyone forgets about Jay Kelly a little bit quicker. For David Cromer's production Clooney and Grant Heslov adapt their own script, with Clooney moving up to the lead role of Edward R. Murrow, the 1950s CBS news reporter whose team took on the, at the time seemingly all-powerful, Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy's HUAC witchhunts, most famous on stage as the inspiration for The Crucible, used a panic they themselves had largely created about Communist spies hiding in America, to build a culture of fear where McCarthy was the ultimate arbiter of what was true and who was loyal.

Stage-to-screen review: Much Ado About Nothing (Bellwether Pictures)

I rarely venture away from live performance in my reviews on this blog, but if the worlds of Shakespeare and Buffy the Vampire Slayer collide you know I'm going to be interested¹. Since Joss Whedon started running TV shows in 1996 he's been fond of using certain actors again and again across Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse and Dr Horrible, while constantly adding new faces to the ensemble. It's also been common knowledge that his casts would spend their days off at Whedon's home where he'd direct them in Shakespeare readings. So when a black and white film version of Much Ado About Nothing suddenly materialised, filmed secretly at Whedon's Hollywood mansion in the break between shooting and post-production of Avengers Assemble, it was both a surprise and somehow completely inevitable. In retrospect, all these years he's been building a repertory company, but for TV and film rather than theatre.