Directing Clooney and a Corpse: With Good Night, and Good Luck and Dead Outlaw, David Cromer Pulls Off an Impossible Double Act

Director David Cromer has earned himself a new label: “the busiest man on Broadway.” It’s hard to argue otherwise.

The MacArthur Fellow engaged in the ultimate theatrical doubleheader this April, helming both the musically macabre Dead Outlaw and the politically charged Good Night, and Good Luck, the latter starring none other than George Clooney. Just 24 days separated their openings.

“It’s been busy, but I rest on weekends,” Cromer says with a laugh.

Before his Broadway sprint, Cromer co-directed The Antiquities, an imaginative sci-fi drama at Playwrights Horizons. And he’s already preparing for the world premiere of Caroline, which will play MCC this fall.

“Sure, I could use a break, and I'm definitely worried about quality going in the toilet, but the universe will tell me when that starts to happen."

It hasn’t. If anything, the universe seems to be giving Cromer—a current Tony nominee for his direction of Dead Outlaw—its stamp of approval, for both performing scheduling miracles, but also quietly redrawing the boundaries of what theater can do, and how an audience experiences it.

Cromer’s busy spring 2025 was set in motion years ago, when he said “yes” to David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna’s offer to transform their unconventional song cycle about Elmer McCurdy—a bandit whose corpse went on a decades-long posthumous journey—into a theatrical experience. It didn’t take much convincing for Cromer to join the Dead Outlaw team, but, he admits, it did take a leap of faith.

“The first reason you say ‘yes’ is just because it’s David Yazbek,” Cromer says. The two collaborated previously on The Band’s Visit, an experience that won them both their first Tony Awards. “But when he told me what he was trying to write, I couldn't see it quite yet.” Cromer describes going to concert after concert, listening until the songs began to take root, “like listening to an album you’re not sure about at first. Then you get hooked.”

Defining what Dead Outlaw was became as much about defining what it was not. The creative team quickly identified that their show would never be a “big musical.” It would also deliberately shun traditional scenes and spectacle (a perfect fit for Audible’s theater division, which signed on to produce). The show would, however, let its rock, country and bluegrass score blossom into a genre-defying American musical.

At the Longacre Theatre, audiences are greeted with a single set—a bandstand—and not much else. A cast of eight brings out a few additional pieces, such as a casket and coroner’s table. But it’s clear that this show was conceived with its band—and its energetic, rockabilly tunes—front and center. “We didn't want to smother it with concept,” Cromer says. “It was about allowing the story to sneak out from around the band, out onto the stage and into the audience.”

Of course, that's easier said than done when your story is about a man more famous in death than life. McCurdy is only alive for about half of the show’s roughly 100-minute run time. His arsenic-preserved body takes over for the rest. Cromer hardly shies away from pointedly, and sharply, using McCurdy’s twisted yarn to explore themes of death, legacy and consumerism. But, in an attempt to let that story creep forward, he swaddles his dead outlaw in humor and humanity. “We needed to allow the piece as much beauty as we could pull out of the dust and the gravel,” Cromer says. “I knew we would let it soar when it wanted to.”

But it wasn’t just a singing bandit crowding Cromer’s schedule this spring. There was also George Clooney.

Clooney has worked for decades to bring Edward R. Murrow’s history-altering, televised takedown of Senator Joseph McCarthy to the stage. In 2004, Clooney first attempted to develop a live, dramatic special, but it was rejected by CBS. So, alongside Grant Heslov, he wrote and starred in the 2005 film, Good Night, and Good Luck, which brought the story to cinemas. The stage version represents a return to the duo's original idea of a televised play. To make it happen, they needed some theater muscle. In stepped Cromer, albeit a bit star-struck himself.

“George, who carries a lot of cachet and glamour and power and mystique, comes into a room and puts everybody at ease,” Cromer says. “He wants everyone to have a good time and wants to hear what people have to say.”

The show’s Broadway run has been buzzy—and not only because Clooney is starring nightly as Murrow. Never before has a Broadway play been televised live. That will change June 7, the night before this year’s Tony Awards. In a long-awaited full circle moment, CNN has agreed to broadcast the show’s penultimate performance as it happens on stage.

On the phone ahead of a camera blocking meeting for the live special, Cromer is clearly excited to bring the drama, drenched in cigarette smoke and mid-century resolve, to the masses. No significant changes are planned for the live broadcast. It's a fitting and very meta end for a story based on a real-life moment in the golden age of journalism. “As George always says, it’s about ‘speaking truth to power.’ This [production] has always been a high-profile vehicle for those words, at a time when we thought it would be helpful to hear them.”

Balancing two Broadway juggernauts—both making history in their own way—would be enough to exhaust most people. Cromer seems to absorb the momentum like a gravitational center. “You just try to tune in to whatever each one is asking for,” Cromer says. “The difference is presented to you every day by the work itself.”

This director has no plans to slow down any time soon, although he may pause for a short nap. “If I was a painter, I would keep putting canvases on the easel,” Cromer says. “Maybe it's my fear of death, but I just keep trying to make stuff.”