Reflections on the heyday of scandalous Fleet Street likely wont stir Broadway audiences with the same vigor that roused the West End when Ink debuted there in 2017. Little matter. James Grahams play is so well-crafted that not knowing your Sun from your Mirror is a fairly minor hindrance.
Opening tonight in a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, the fact-based play, starring a ferocious Jonny Lee Miller (Broadways After Miss Julie, TVs Elementary) and, in a role that won him a 2018 Olivier Award, Bertie Carvel, chronicles the wild, woolly days of a young Rupert Murdoch and the newspaperman who helped him reshape Britains stodgy, moralistic press into something completely different.
Miller plays editor Larry Lamb, a working class hero with a mysterious mark-of-Cain scar on his forehead, all the journalism experience Murdoch doesnt have and the strivers drive they share to topple the elites who tell the public what it thinks the public needs.
Its 1969, and Murdoch – played by Carvel with a combination of silky venom and a dreamers dazzle – has just acquired the faltering Sun, his inroad to British society. Or perhaps his grenade. He hires the initially skeptical Lamb and challenges him to best the top-selling Mirror within a year, and to do so by transforming the newspaper into something thoroughly of its time: Irreverent, fearless and populist.
No more preaching about the wonders of classical music – the Sun will take its readers into the love nests of the Rolling Stones. Forget the polite Womens Page niceties – the Sun will write about sex, even if it has to use euphemisms. The readers will know what it all means.
Murdoch and Lamb quickly pull together a lean, brash staff of newcomers and has-beens, all won over by Lambs irresistible enthusiasm and unstoppable confidence. Before long, this guru of the newsroom even surpasses Murdoch in pushing the boundaries of taste. The Page 3 girls make their debut, bikini tops at first and, then, not.
The cast of “Ink”
Graham and director Rupert Goold (King Charles III, American Psycho) cleverly illustrate the exhilaration of this chaotic frontier by peppering the play with eruptions of music and dance, particularly in the lets-put-on-a-paper first act. The band of journos is a lively, odd-lot bunch, to say the least, from the womens page editor (Tara Summers) who both protects and exploits (to a point) her Page 3 girls to the Mod, vaguely gender-confused photographer (Andrew Durand) who makes his own path in the old boys club.
Unfolding against a backdrop of headline projections and on Bunny Christies determinedly chaotic jumble of newsroom desks stacked pyramid-shape (the second pyramid scheme to grace Broadway recently, with corpses so-piled over at Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus), Ink has us on Team Murdoch throughout the first act, as we and the play cant help side with the underdog Murdoch once was. Who wouldnt cheer on a crew that favors Keith Moon over whatever easy-listening medicine is on tap elsewhere?
But Ink gets a bit too black-and-white in its foreshadowing, and by the second act we know the monster thats coming. The quick scenes and dance break-outs give way to two longer sub-plots that encapsulate what Rupert hath started to wrought: In one, the young Page 3 model weve come to like is all but seduced into doffing her top, a history-making moveRead More – Source
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