Ink

[edjames]

Another UK transplant. On the heels of a critically acclaimed run in the West End, this play tells the tale of tabloid czar Rupert Murdoch's (brilliantly played by Bertie Carvel) purchase of the Sun newspaper in the late 1960's in London. The Sun was a failed and little read newspaper until Murdoch bought and hired a team to revamp the paper and make it the top selling tabloid in the UK. Hiring editor Larry Lamb (brilliantly played by Johnny Lee Miller), Murdoch and Lamb proceed to upend the notions of British journalism, while winning readers along the way.

There are hectic and zany moments of cabaret and brilliance in this production as Larry Lamb proceeds to break the norms of his profession to push the Sun to the top. The direction is terrific and the script top notch. A fantastical set piled high with gray metal desks and typewriters, and phenomenal cast of character actors playing working girls, flower children, stone-smiting chapel fathers, booze-hounds and hacks round out this production.

I cannot express my admiration of Miller and Carvel. Their acting is superb.

Opens April 24.

The show has been available on TDF.

My one quibble is that the show is perhaps about 15 minutes too long.

[edjames]

Great reviews! Once again, I enjoyed it very much.

 

Ben Brantley in today's NYTimes says:

 

Review: In ‘Ink,’ a Mephistopheles Named Murdoch Takes Charge

Did you hear the one about the guy who sells his soul to the devil? How about the story in which an entire country does the same thing?

These cautionary tales intersect to highly invigorating effect in James Graham’s “Ink,” which opened on Wednesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. And don’t worry, uneasy Americans, it’s not about you.

Except that it is.

Directed with vaudevillian flair and firecracker snap by Rupert Goold, “Ink” is set in London, in the gory glory days of a quaint phenomenon: print journalism. The show begins in 1969, with the purchase of a dying newspaper. Old, er, news, right?

On the contrary. Mr. Graham’s account of the resurrection of that paper — into a tabloid behemoth that hypnotizes its readership while forever altering its competition’s DNA — foretells the age of populist media in which we now live and squirm.

As for the Mephistopheles who sets this process into motion, he is still very much alive and reigning over a robust empire that probably reaches into your own home. His name is Rupert Murdoch.

As drawn with Dickensian relish by Bertie Carvel, this Murdoch is indeed a man of wealth and taste, with a surprising touch of the prig. And by artfully tapping into the most primal instincts of those he would have do his bidding, Mr. Carvel’s Murdoch is someone to whom it is all but impossible to say no.

First staged at London’s hit-incubating Almeida Theater in 2017, “Ink” charts Murdoch’s seduction of one Larry Lamb (Jonny Lee Miller), an editor steeped in the old-school values of Fleet Street, then the main artery of British journalism. It is Lamb whom Murdoch, freshly arrived from Australia, chooses to oversee the rebirth of his new purchase, The Sun — a “stuck-up broadsheet,” as he describes it — as a tabloid for the masses.

As embodied by a terrific Mr. Miller, Lamb is a natural-born Faust, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith itching to join the exclusive club of masthead-topping titans. More than Richard Coyle, who brought a brooding ambivalence to the same part in London, Mr. Miller’s Lamb blazes with ambition and class resentment.

As embodied by a terrific Mr. Miller, Lamb is a natural-born Faust, the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith itching to join the exclusive club of masthead-topping titans. More than Richard Coyle, who brought a brooding ambivalence to the same part in London, Mr. Miller’s Lamb blazes with ambition and class resentment.

It is indeed fun to watch Lamb and his crew brainstorming in meetings about how to best their rivals, while pondering what “people really like.” The answers include television, gossip and sex — obvious, perhaps, but nonetheless waiting to be exploited with a new, unapologetic directness. Factual accuracy becomes secondary.

As Murdoch tells the staff just before the first edition of the revamped Sun goes to press: “You’ve decided to give people what they want. Something so radical — and yet so simple. To hold up a mirror … to ourselves. And to hell with the consequences if we don’t like what we see. It’s who we are.”

Or as Murdoch urges Lamb, “Get the readers to become the storytellers.” He adds, “Isn’t that the real end point of the revolution? When they’re producing their own content themselves?”

Those words might be the credo of any number of latter-day moguls, including Mark Zuckerberg. “Ink” proposes that the sensibility that would generate today’s tidal wave of social media originated with early London-era Murdoch.

Those words might be the credo of any number of latter-day moguls, including Mark Zuckerberg. “Ink” proposes that the sensibility that would generate today’s tidal wave of social media originated with early London-era Murdoch.

The largely American, multicast ensemble deploys varyingly confident British accents. But it does well in sustaining the play’s propulsive momentum. Its members include Andrew Durand as an awkward young photographer, David Wilson Barnes as Lamb’s lieutenant and a first-rate Michael Siberry as the gentlemanly rival editor Hugh Cudlipp, the personification of the tottering old regime.

The show’s most potent chemistry is, as it should be, between Mr. Miller’s Lamb, as he becomes increasingly drunk on the thrill of success at all costs, and Mr. Carvel’s exquisitely manipulative Murdoch. Previously seen on Broadway as the demonic headmistress of the musical “Matilda,” Mr. Carvel once again delivers a balletically precise study in power incarnate.

[edjames]

Extended till June 23.

 

JOHNNY OLEKSINSKI in today's NYPost gave it 4 Stars.

 

‘Ink’ review: Broadway’s latest is a scrappy, seductive tabloid tale

“Sexy” is not a word you’d use to describe the founding of most newspapers. More accurate descriptors might include: “formal,” “dusty” and “self-important.” The Sun, however, is not like most newspapers.

The tabloid — Britain’s most popular daily — is bold and brassy, covering the TV show “Love Island” with the same gusto as it does Brexit. After last month’s big jewel heist in London, the Sun’s front page read “Demon Burglar of Fleet Street.” Unlike the Guardian, the Sun is fun.

And so is the exciting new play about it, “Ink,” which opened on Broadway Wednesday night after its West End run. James Graham’s down-and-dirty dramedy tells the story of the 1969 purchase of the struggling paper by a scrappy Australian named Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch (who also owns The Post) had acquired London’s News of the World a year earlier, but the Sun was his biggest prize yet. Bertie Carvel, last seen on Broadway as Miss Trunchbull in “Matilda,” plays him as a lively gate-crasher, determined to infiltrate the clubby, pretentious world of UK paper owners. Not to join it, but to conquer it.

Larry Lamb (Jonny Lee Miller), a working-class editor from northern England, is recruited to lead a merry band of misfits. Lamb’s mission: to transform the Sun from a boring, stodgy broadsheet into a throbbing, popular tabloid. “Make it loud!” Murdoch commands, and gives Lamb one year to make the Sun the top paper in Britain.

Considering its circulation then — under a million, compared with the Daily Mirror’s 5-million-plus daily readers — the Mirror’s Hugh Cudlipp (Michael Siberry) and other rival editors don’t give it a chance. Those chumps are soon left choking on their cigar smoke.

How will Lamb turn things around? One of the funniest scenes starts as a brainstorming session on potential features that spirals into a rebellious free-for-all, as staffers lose their inhibitions and scream their guiltiest pleasures. Sex! Gossip! The weather! The telly!

Their instincts, considered down market at the time, pay off. The Sun takes off — after which there are major consequences and big drama.

Nothing about Graham’s unexpectedly seductive play — the smoky newsroom meetings, back-room deals, even a lesson on how the printing press functions — is ever less than rousing. The show is hoisted even higher by director Rupert Goold, doing his best work since the similarly irreverent “King Charles III,” by mixing in music and dance for a raging party vibe.

Embodying that uproarious spirit is Carvel, who makes Murdoch into a magnetic, eccentric Confucius of the news business. Just as good is Miller, who, as the intrepid and inspired Lamb, challenges his staff to inject “a bit of fun” into their new creation. “Ink” is way more than just a bit of fun.

 

Other reviews here:

http://www.playbill.com/article/read-reviews-for-rupert-murdoch-drama-ink-on-broadway