Network

[Gordonb]

I've just booked tickets for March 2018 for

:

at the National with Bryan Cranston.

So sorry for the BIG picture.

[Gsavage14]

I've just booked tickets for March 2018 for

:

at the National with Bryan Cranston.

So sorry for the BIG picture.

Oooh, can see what I'm going to be doing on Friday...!!

[AmyG]

That sounds fabulous! It opens just after we leave  . I hope this will be part of NT Live. 

[Bobster]

Wow, I will be fascinated to see what this is!

[Gordonb]

National's "Network" trailer

[AmyG]

It's funny how when I was there I saw a poster for it and was excited all over again. I forget completely about this thread. 

[Leighton]

I'm taking my sixth former students in February

[scenicdesign71]

I managed to see this last month, in its final weekend on Broadway, though I'm just now getting around to putting down a few thoughts about it.

Value for money was provided by Bryan Cranston and the set ravenously devouring each other like some unholy double ouroboros.  (Okay, Cranston and the [spectacular, largely livecast] video design, to be more precise, but the excuse to flip the idiom -- scenery chewing back -- was irresistible).

Still, adaptor Lee Hall's animating purpose seemed to begin and end with ventriloquizing a beyond-the-grave "I told you so" from Chayevsky.  The result was certainly topical, but not especially enlightening unless, perhaps, you've been asleep for the last forty years.  (Or even the last three, which, granted, have often felt like forty).

I don't remember the film in enough detail to articulate exactly what's lost in the play's shift of emphasis to the Howard Beale character.  But Cranston owned the proceedings onstage so entirely and unwaveringly that his costars, Tony Goldwyn and Tatiana Maslany, might want to consider pressing charges for petty larceny (though against whom, I'm not altogether clear:  Cranston himself?  Director van Hove, for negligent disinterest in their characters?  Or is that baked into Hall's adaptation?).

I'm glad I saw it, but it didn't really leave a huge impression beyond a vague desire to go back and watch the movie again sometime.