‘Network’ Broadway Review: Bryan Cranston Goes Suitably Mad

By now I’m well past the point in this review where I should have more thoroughly discussed Network, director Ivo van Hove’s Broadway staging of the Paddy Chayefsky TV satire, a production to which the director and his longtime design collaborator Jan Versweyveld have given their trademark ultra-modern glass sheen and multi-media approach (hand-held cameras are used to display live, close-up video on large screens, and in one brief segment even follow two of the stars – Tony Goldwyn and Tatiana Maslany – outside the theater).

But my late-arriving discussion of the production seems justified for a play so completely dominated by a single performance. In most other respects, Network is something of a let-down, and certainly no improvement over the film. Goldwyn is good if miscast as Beale’s longtime friend, colleague and fellow midlife crisis sufferer Max Schumacher, a role better suited to the doughy, sad-sack late-career William Holden than Scandal‘s ever-fit president.