By Melinda Henneberger | The Washington Post
On the front row in the Broadhurst Theatre for the Wednesday matinee of “Lucky Guy,” we were so close to the action up on stage that my husband forgot for a minute that he wasn’t actually in a newsroom as a bunch of reporters gathered around to hear a particularly moving Pulitzer speech.
“He was totally cynical,” one character said of another, eulogizing not just a colleague, but our whole business and way of life. Yet “underneath the cynicism was the same sweet fantasy we all have about this business – that we’re knights, that we right wrongs, and then afterwards you go out and have a drink, because that’s what you do.”
Or what we did, anyway. And when the reporters up on the stage applauded, the totally cynical knight sitting beside me forgot where he was and clapped too.
Nora Ephron’s last play, starring her friend Tom Hanks, is imperfect but mostly true, just like its subject and its main character, Mike McAlary, a columnist who burned up New York tabloids in the ’80s and ’90s and died of cancer at the age of 41.
