David Cromer doesn’t take himself too seriously. When asked how he’s feeling about directing Good Night, and Good Luck (starring George Clooney) and the new musical Dead Outlaw (co-created by David Yazbek) back-to-back in one Broadway season, this was his answer: “There are good days and bad days. There are days I go, ‘Okay, I’m pushing myself.’ And there’s days you feel you’re a hack.”
As a Tony-winning director and actor, Cromer moves seamlessly from plays to musicals, big shows to small, intimate productions (including a 2023 Uncle Vanya he starred in in a Flatiron apartment). So in short, Cromer may be a bit hard on himself. After all, it was the producers of Good Night, and Good Luck who reached out to Cromer a couple years ago, saying that Oscar winners George Clooney and Grant Heslov had written a stage adaptation of their 2005 film and needed a director. Good Night, and Good Luck follows broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, played by Clooney, who famously stood up to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare of the 1950s. Anna Shapiro had been attached to direct and had to bow out due to other commitments; Cromer called Shapiro to get her blessing.
Explains Cromer: “This story is very, very dear to [George] for a lot of reasons. Not only is it a big, beautiful film he made, but it has to do with his father, who was an anchorman and journalist. It has to do with a lifetime of exposure to these people and these ideas. I think that's why it's very personal.”
Speaking to Playbill in February, Cromer was deep in rehearsals for Good Night, and Good Luck, which begins previews March 12 (with an April 3 opening night) at the Winter Garden Theatre. And after he freezes Good Night, he'll go into rehearsals for Dead Outlaw, which begins performances April 12 at the Longacre Theatre, with an opening night of April 27 (making it the last show to open in the 2024–2025 Broadway season). Oh, and he also co-directed (with Caitlin Sullivan) The Antiquities back in January—a new Off-Broadway play by Jordan Harrison about the end of humanity. All serious work, though Cromer speaks about them with a bit of cheek.
"I am fortunate," Cromer says. "I don't have kids. I don't have a heroin problem. I don't have a lot of the things that occupy most of my colleagues." He then adds, chuckling, "Not heroin. But I don't have any of the things that take up a lifetime, that other people have. It's a luxury to get to work on a couple of things at once."
On the surface, Cromer's current Broadway projects couldn't be more opposite. Good Night is a star-driven vehicle with a cast of 25 playing in one of the biggest theatres on Broadway. Dead Outlaw is more modest—it's a musical that originally premiered Off-Broadway, with no stars, only eight actors, and a five-piece band. It's playing at the Longacre, which has 500 fewer seats than the Winter Garden. While directing Clooney (who Cromer says is "very good at putting people at ease, and he is very good at trusting his collaborators") seems like a surefire commercial bet—Dead Outlaw seems less so. For one, the musical is about a real-life robber who died and whose corpse became a traveling sideshow. Not exactly the kind of thing that screams "big Broadway musical."
But Cromer isn't worried—he did win a Tony Award for directing The Band's Visit, a similarly intimate musical from the same team as Dead Outlaw. "When we were doing Band's Visit, people used to say to David [Yazbek] and Itamar [Moses], 'Boy, this isn't the kind of thing you'd think would make a good musical,'" recalls Cromer, who then paraphrased something that Moses likes to say: "All the best musicals are bad ideas. A three-hour rap musical about Alexander Hamilton is an objectively terrible idea, except it is a masterpiece. A play with an empty stage about people auditioning to be dancers, it's not an interesting idea for a musical. Execution is everything."
Cromer isn't interested in musicals that can be summed up in an elevator pitch, that tells audiences what to expect before they've even seen it. Sure there's a corpse in Dead Outlaw, but there's also a warm beating heart: "Dead Outlaw is a very strange thing. It is about mortality. It's about death. It's about ambition and fame and America, and it's about things that don't sound good on paper...And so, we're getting to Broadway, and we will live and die on whether people see it and go and tell their friends." Though considering the rave reviews Off-Broadway and the multiple Best Musical Awards so far—Dead Outlaw does have some strong winds on its back.
Speaking to Cromer on that brisk February day, it was clear he was more focused on making sure the "great piece of writing" that he's been in charge of stewarding is fully realized on the stage. And perhaps, besides both shows being based on real events, what actually ties them together is Cromer's distinct sensibility—honed from decades of working in downtown theatre, where low budgets meant he had to come up with ingenious solutions to transport the audience to different times and places. And many times, those solutions lean towards the theatrical.
For Good Night, Cromer was clear in his vision of what he wanted for this production; he wasn’t going to recreate the film—which was shot documentary-style in black and white. Instead, he was going to recreate CBS’ huge broadcast studio, with its soundstages, offices, dressing rooms, and conference rooms. There’s going to be a screen on stage, ’50s-style television monitors, and a live camera feed. Though the Winter Garden's stage is known for being something of a barn because of its vast size, Cromer wants to create moments of intimacy in that large space using cameras. "We have this big space, and we make it smaller and smaller and smaller. We put it through the camera, and then it goes out into another set of boxes, which is the video screens," he explains. He hopes that the use of cameras will create "the intimacy of a television audience's relationship to Murrow."
Dead Outlaw is smaller in size and budget, but its scope is large. It follows an outlaw named Elmer McCurdy, who died in 1911 during a robbery gone wrong. Then in a stranger-than-fiction twist, McCurdy's corpse becomes something of a curiosity, traveling to circus and museums until he is finally laid to rest in 1977. Composers David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna have been working on the show for a decade, so obsessed with this macabre tale that they first conceptualized it as a song cycle. They brought Cromer onboard seven years ago, with book writer Itamar Moses signing on four years ago; Cromer admits they were stuck for a while on how to tell this tall tale, which spans half a century and goes from Oklahoma to California. There's also a chase scene aboard a moving train.
"Through a series of combination conversations, we realized, 'Well, what if we did a draft where there was a storyteller, and he was telling the story, and it would kind of set up a song? And sometimes, you'd have characters sing the songs, but mostly the band leader would sing them.'" That idea gave birth to the look of the show. For Dead Outlaw's world premiere last year at the Minetta Lane Theatre, produced by Audible, the creative team decided that the stage would be mostly bare aside from a unit set that moves—that set piece (decked out with twinkle lights) housed the musicians and the narrator (played by Jeb Brown). It also doubled as a saloon and a runaway train. Other set pieces would come in and out from the wings as necessary, such as a coroner's slab, a casket, and a cement spout (for the eventual burial of McCurdy).
As Cromer recalls, with pride: "We were just about to sign off on the set, and there was no money, and I said, 'Hey, can we figure out how to pour concrete on a tube into a hole at the end?' And it was sort of a deadly pause, but we figured it out: You get a tube, it's kitty litter and vegetable oil—in case you want to make fake cement at home."
Stage cement directions aside, it's a marker of Cromer's aesthetic, honed from years of doing more with less—a tent pole that he has not given up. What continues to matter most to this director is the work itself. That's why after he finishes up his current directing projects, he's going to go act in a new play Off-Broadway. And that's what attracted him to Good Night, and Good Luck. It was the script, which hit him to his core—of what it takes to stand up to oppression: "I used to think it was easy heroism to do this. I used to think it was, obviously, the right thing to do. As I got older, I started to understand that it's really easy to get intimidated. It's really easy to get spooked and scared and shut down and worried that if you stand up, you're going to get labeled something that society is not that into. I was very excited about that; l was very excited by the fear, the idea of it."
The director admits he never likes to use the word “relevant” to describe any of his projects: "I don't think that's what people go to the theatre for. I don't think people come out of a play and run to the barricades." But working on a play about a journalist who speaks up against an abuse of power—in an era where restrictive laws are currently being passed against women, immigrants, and trans individuals and where oligarchs are limiting what the papers can print—the timing is eerie. Says Cromer: “It feels very close to the bone and very immediate…I walk out of my home and away from the newspaper or my phone, I go into rehearsal, and it’s exactly the same feeling. So if nothing else, I feel less alone and less helpless while working on this.”
In the play, Murrow tells his staff, “We have to do this because the terror is right here in this room.” Cromer hopes to give a similar wake-up call to audiences watching in the Winter Garden, when they will see George Clooney as Murrow walk to the edge of the stage and say to the house, "We will not walk in fear." Perhaps such a visceral experience can wake people up from their current state of shock. Maybe. Cromer hopes so.
“I don’t know if people will go to the barricades. I don’t know what we’re going to do about any of this.” He then smiles, sadly, “But this is all I can think of to do.”
