The case for more movie and TV releases of Broadway shows

George Clooney’s stage version of 'Good Night and Good Luck' is headed to… CNN. Let’s see more of that, please.

As part of Broadway’s recent trend towards dependence on guest appearances by big movie stars, George Clooney has been starring in a stage adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck, the movie of which was his directorial debut in 2005.

Both versions of Good Night and Good Luck are about Edward R. Murrow’s confrontation with Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. The 2005 movie was meant as an Iraq War allegory, while the current version is more against the backdrop of modern-day matters; like Cabaret or Fiddler on the Roof, this is one of those things where every revival is always going to have present-day analogs.

The difference is that while Clooney played a supporting role in the film, in the play, he’s Murrow, a role he has said he was too young to play 20 years ago.

The play, nominated for five Tony awards, is getting set to finish its run, but last week, CNN announced that it will air the second-to-last performance of the play live on June 7. It marks the first time in history that a performtance of a Broadway play has been aired live on television. Cord-cutters are in luck, too; it will air on CNN.com with a cable subscription required. It is interesting that it landed on CNN, rather than on CBS, the network where the play takes place.

I’m very much in favor of this sort of thing, and the more, the better.

A company called RadicalMedia has come up with an innovative way to film stage shows with multiple cameras; they’re responsible for the Disney+ version of Hamilton, as well as the HBO version of David Byrne’s American Utopia, and some other similar shows. Sony Pictures Classics also announced last month that it will release a filmed version of the recent revival of Merrily, We Roll Along, which will get a theatrical release.

I’ve always hoped we could get more things like that, especially when there’s a buzzy, star-studded Broadway production. I know I would watch a streaming or theatrical movie version of the Glengarry Glen Ross show currently on Broadway with Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk, or the version of Angels in America with Nathan Lane a few years ago, which had some scenes included in a documentary about Roy Cohn, but was never released on its own.