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    George Clooney and Denzel Washington Power Broadway to Prepandemic Heights

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    Broadway’s box office has finally surpassed its prepandemic peak, fueled by three starry dramas and one green witch.The Broadway League, a trade organization representing producers and theater owners, released data on Tuesday showing that grosses for the current theater season, which ends later this month, have now reached $1.801 billion. That’s higher than the $1.793 billion grossed at the same point in the record-setting 2018-2019 season, which was the last full season before the coronavirus pandemic shut down Broadway in March 2020.CLOONEY HAS FIRST$4 MILLION PLAY WEEK!“Good Night, and Good Luck” grossed $4,003,482 the week ending May 4. That number, for eight performances, was the highest amount ever grossed in a week by a play on Broadway.There are caveats. This season is not quite over. The numbers are not adjusted for inflation. Attendance is still down about 3 percent from its prepandemic peak. And, because the costs of producing shows on Broadway have skyrocketed, the financial failure rate is up and profitability is down.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2025 Tony Awards: George Clooney, Sarah Snook and Sadie Sink Among Nominees

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      The new musicals “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Maybe Happy Ending” tied for the most Tony nominations, with 10 each.George Clooney, Mia Farrow, Sarah Snook and Sadie Sink all picked up Tony nominations on Thursday as Broadway began its celebration of an unusually starry season.In a robust season with 14 new musicals, three tied for the most nominations, with 10 each: “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Maybe Happy Ending.” And Audra McDonald, who has already won a record six competitive Tony Awards, set another record: she picked up her 11th nomination for her role in “Gypsy,” making her the most-nominated performer ever.The nominations were announced at the end of the most robust Broadway season since the pandemic. Box office grosses are approaching prepandemic levels amid a bumper crop of 42 show openings. Several productions have drawn much-desired young audiences, and the season featured a mix of quirky and original shows alongside big-brand spectacle. But the industry faces challenges too: Ticket prices, especially for the hottest shows, have become out-of-reach for many, and fewer shows are turning a profit as the cost of producing has risen.The closely watched race for best new musical, bizarrely enough, features three shows concerning dead bodies: “Dead Outlaw,” which tells the story of a train robber whose corpse became an attraction; “Operation Mincemeat,” about a strange-but-true World War II British intelligence operation involving disinformation planted on a corpse, and “Death Becomes Her,” a stage adaptation of the film about two undead frenemies. The other two contenders are “Buena Vista Social Club,” about the group of beloved Cuban musicians, and “Maybe Happy Ending,” about a relationship between two robots.Hue Park, who wrote “Maybe Happy Ending” with Will Aronson, said the nominations affirmed a stunning turnaround for the show. “We had a very rough start, and we were not sure if the show would stay running,” Park said. “Being an original story, not based on famous IP, was the biggest challenge in the beginning, but at the same time for that reason the entire theater community has tried to support us, and that is one of the main reasons the show is still surviving and getting these nominations.”Three new musicals tied for the most nominations, with 10 each: “Maybe Happy Ending,” “Buena Vista Social Club” and “Death Becomes Her.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Stars Come Out for George Clooney’s ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ Opening

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      In the wake of President Trump unleashing a new series of tariffs that sent markets into a steep decline, a group of stars shoved into the Winter Garden Theater in Midtown Manhattan to see a play that lionizes the press, takes aim at right-wing politicians, and features actors talking about how they wake up in the morning unable to recognize the world around them.Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC were on the right side of the theater, a few rows behind Gayle King of CBS. Uma Thurman and Kylie Minogue hovered nearby.Even Jennifer Lopez was in the house, though that was not much of a surprise. The co-writer and star of the play she was about to see was George Clooney, who appeared alongside Ms. Lopez in the 1998 Steven Soderbergh caper “Out of Sight.”The play, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” is an adaptation of the 2005 film that Mr. Clooney directed and that takes place in the 1950s during the height of the red scare.It tells the story of Edward R. Murrow, the crusading CBS anchorman who used his platform to help bring about the downfall of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and end a government campaign against suspected American communists.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: Clooney, Fair and Balanced, in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’

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      George Clooney makes Edward R. Murrow a saint of sane journalism for a world that still needs one in a stage adaptation of the 2005 movie.“This just might do nobody any good” is a chancy first line for a play.Or maybe not too chancy at that, when the man who delivers it is George Clooney, and the man he’s portraying is Edward R. Murrow. This is, after all, Broadway, where glossy demigods of the left are loved.Still, Clooney has never previously appeared on its stages — “so … buckle up,” he writes in his bio.That Murrow has him beat in that regard, having appeared as a character in a musical called “Senator Joe,” is not surprising. He was, after all, a world-famous journalist whose first name might as well have been “crusading.” As “Good Night, and Good Luck” begins, what he’s crusading for, in a speech to news directors, is a complete rethink of television, which in choosing to “distract, delude, amuse and insulate” is making Americans “fat, comfortable and complacent.”That’s in 1958. Looking at the diminished state of television news today, you’d have to conclude he was right: His speech did nobody any good.But his journalism is another story, and that’s the one “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden, wants to tell. To do so, it quickly jumps back to 1953 and into CBS’s Studio 41, where Murrow and his producer, Fred W. Friendly, run the small empire that creates the newsmagazine “See It Now.” They are about to embark on a series of broadcasts designed to unmask, and thus destroy, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Communist-witch-hunting demagogue. Amazingly, they succeed.Clooney, at right, is aided by a capable cast, including from left: Fran Kranz, Michael Nathanson, Glenn Fleshler, Christopher Denham, Ilana Glazer, Jennifer Morris and Carter Hudson.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      George Clooney’s ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ Sets Broadway Box Office Record

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      “Good Night, and Good Luck” grossed $3.3 million last week, breaking a record that was set earlier this month by Denzel Washington’s “Othello.”Broadway box office records are falling like dominoes this season as a handful of starry plays entice fans to pay sky-high ticket prices to see their favorite movie stars up close and emoting.“Good Night, and Good Luck,” a new play starring George Clooney, grossed $3.3 million last week, the most money a nonmusical play has ever made during a single week on Broadway, according to data released Tuesday by the Broadway League. And it did so with just a seven-performance week: It is still in previews, and not yet doing Broadway’s typical eight.It shattered the previous record, which was set just two weeks earlier by a new production of “Othello” starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, which grossed $2.8 million in the week that ended March 9. (Before that, the record had been held by “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which grossed $2.7 million during a holiday week in late 2023.)“Othello” still has higher ticket prices — its top seats were being sold on its website for $921, compared to $799 for “Good Night, and Good Luck” — but “Good Night, and Good Luck” is playing in a larger theater, so it is taking in more money overall.The average ticket price for “Othello” was $303.15 last week — down from previous weeks because of free seats for journalists attending press performances and guests attending opening night. The average price for “Good Night, and Good Luck” was $302.07. But “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which is adapted from the 2005 movie about the broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, is playing in the 1,545-seat Winter Garden Theater, while “Othello” is in the 1,043-seat Ethel Barrymore.Broadway’s box office has traditionally been dominated by musicals, which tend to be more popular, to play longer, and to run in larger theaters than plays. The record for the most money made by a Broadway musical was set late last year, when “Wicked” grossed $5 million during a Christmas week when there were nine performances.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      George Clooney Is Making His Broadway Debut With ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’

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      George Clooney has been sneaking outside to smoke.Not like his friend Barack Obama used to, when he was running for president and his wife, Michelle, was after him to quit. Clooney doesn’t even like smoking.“I had to get better at inhaling,” he said. “I go outside so the kids don’t see and smoke a little bit.” He plans to switch to herbal cigarettes when he makes his Broadway debut next month in a stage adaptation of his 2005 movie, “Good Night, and Good Luck.”Smoking has been unpleasant, he said, because in his Kentucky clan “eight uncles and aunts all died of lung cancer — it’s a big deal.” He noted that his aunt Rosemary Clooney, the torch singer and movie star, was 74 when she died in 2002 from complications of lung cancer. “My dad’s the only one that didn’t smoke, and he’s 91.”Clooney, looking slender in a black Theory shirt and navy pants, sat on a rose-colored couch late last month at Casa Cipriani, a hotel at the bottom of Manhattan. He would sit there for the next five hours, until the sun set over the bay, not bothering with lunch, not looking at his phone, not checking with his minders, just spinning ensorcelling tales about love, Hollywood and politics like a modern-day Scheherazade.Unlike in the film, where he took on the nonsmoking role of Fred Friendly, the producer of the CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, on Broadway Clooney will play Murrow himself, who had a three-pack-a-day habit and died in 1965 at the age of 57 of complications from lung cancer. A decade before his death, Murrow was one of the first to report on links between smoking and lung cancer on his show, “See It Now.” It was the rare episode in which he didn’t light up.In the film version of “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney, standing, played the news producer Fred Friendly, while David Strathairn, seated in the background, played Edward R. Murrow.Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Independent PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Wolfs’ Review: Brad Pitt and George Clooney as Themselves

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      They play underworld fixers in this trifle of a movie, though really they’re here to look enviably fabulous.“Wolfs” — a new something or other starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt — would like you to think it’s a thriller with a helping of comedy, though maybe a comedy with guns and guts. Whatever the case, it isn’t remotely tense or mysterious, and its modest thrills derive wholly from the spectacle of two beautifully aged, primped, pampered and expensive film stars going through the motions with winks and a degree of brittle charm. The movie is a trifle, and it knows it. Mostly, though, “Wolfs,” written and directed by Jon Watts, is an excuse for its two leads to riff on their own personas, which can be faintly amusing and certainly watchable but also insufferably smug. It’s insufferable a lot.Clooney and Pitt play underworld fixers, the kind of misterioso professionals whom people with power and money hire to clean up their messes. Much like the character in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” played by Harvey Keitel — named Winston Wolfe but known as the Wolf — the fixers here swoop in and, with some elbow grease and a duffel bag large enough to hold a body, discreetly make the problem go away, or that’s the idea. Tarantino’s influence is conspicuous throughout “Wolfs,” most notably in its reams of self-aware dialogue, theatricality, casual violence and focus on characters talking to and at each other, including in a diner booth.The fixers in “Wolfs” meet cute, as it were, early on when Pitt’s unnamed character interrupts Clooney’s mid-job inside a sprawling penthouse in a New York hotel. Since neither character has a name, it’s easier to refer to the actors playing them, which is very much to the movie’s meta-referential point. Clooney is tidying up a gruesome mess involving a local politician, Pam (a reliably appealing Amy Ryan). Faced with a potentially career-torpedoing situation — there’s blood and shattered glass on the floor, along with what may be the body of a dead male prostitute — Pam has speed-dialed a mysterious number hoping for help. Clooney comes to the rescue, and it’s on.Pitt’s arrival baffles Clooney and adds to what becomes a messier, more dangerous problem. After some teasingly testy back and forth, the two settle into a wary partnership. Pam cleans up and splits as Clooney cleverly deals with her mess in between side-eyeing Pitt. (If you ever wanted to know how to unobtrusively move a body, this movie offers a helpful to-do list.) And then Pitt spies a backpack holding several bricks of drugs, and the cleanup becomes instantly far more complicated. It gets trickier still when the body turns out to be alive, and he flees into the night. Called the Kid (Austin Abrams), he looks a bit like Griffin Dunne in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” another nocturnal adventure that racks up mileage in downtown New York.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hollywood Is Heading for Broadway (and Off). Here’s a Cheat Sheet.

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      New York’s stages have long drawn talent from Hollywood, but this is shaping up to be an exceptionally starry season. Why? Producers have determined that limited-run plays with celebrities are more likely than new musicals to make money. And some musicals are also hoping big names will help at the box office. Here’s a sampling of stars onstage this season.This Fall★ ON BROADWAY ★Mia Farrowin ‘The Roommate’Farrow, who made her stage debut when she was 18 and had a breakout role in the 1968 film “Rosemary’s Baby,” thought she was happily retired until she read the script for this Jen Silverman comedy about two women with not much in common other than their living quarters. Now, at 79, she’s returning to the stage, opposite the three-time Tony winner Patti LuPone, for what she says may be the last time. Now running at the Booth.★ ON BROADWAY ★Robert Downey Jr.in ‘McNeal’One of Hollywood’s most successful stars, Downey has a bevy of superhero movies under his belt (he played Iron Man) and an Oscar for “Oppenheimer” (he was the antagonist, Lewis Strauss). He’s making his Broadway debut in a new Ayad Akhtar play, portraying a famous novelist with a potentially problematic interest in A.I. Now running at the Vivian Beaumont.Clockwise from top left: Nicole Scherzinger, Katie Holmes, Jim Parsons, Adam Driver and Mia Farrow (center).Photographs via Associated Press; Getty Images; Reuters★ ON BROADWAY ★Daniel Dae Kimin ‘Yellow Face’Talk about meta! This is David Henry Hwang’s play about a play about a musical, sort of. Kim, known for “Lost” and the rebooted “Hawaii Five-0,” portrays a playwright named DHH (get it?) who mistakenly casts a white actor as an Asian character in a Broadway flop inspired by his own protests against the casting of a white actor as a Eurasian character in “Miss Saigon.” Previews begin Sept. 13 at the Todd Haimes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Venice Film Festival Looks: Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt And More

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      No amount of star power can truly outshine the beauty of La Serenissima, the ancient republic better known as the city of Venice. But the Venice Film Festival, with its parade of A-listers arriving for movie premieres in water taxis, comes close.Typically held not long after the fall couture shows in Paris, the Venice Film Festival benefits, in pure fashion terms, from being a showcase of the newest garments from some designers. How these elaborate, often form-fitting, confections are transferred so rapidly from Parisian runways to Venetian red carpets hardly matters to looky-loos with their eyes perennially pressed to the glass of fashion.This year’s festival, running from Aug. 28 until Saturday, has not just been an exhibition for new designs, but also of vintage pieces. Some looked as fresh as ever. Garments old and new are among these 15 looks, which will be hard to forget for reasons good and bad (but mostly good).Taylor Russell: Most Modern Retro!Louisa Gouliamaki/ReutersThe actress radiated an icy elegance in a Loewe gown reminiscent of the creations of Jean Louis, a designer who had the lock on high glamour during the golden age of Hollywood studios.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More