Bert Emmett is on fire in the role that won Peter Finch a posthumous Oscar, but the snail-paced production the Group Rep has staged of Lee Hall’s West End-to-Broadway adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning screenplay for 1976’s Network fails to ignite similar sparks.

 On paper at least, the play’s first local production following acclaimed London and New York runs represents a coup for the venerable North Hollywood membership company.

The Sydney Lumet-directed movie proved not only an Oscar favorite but won critical acclaim for the way it anticipated Jerry Springer-like shock TV in creating a nightly news anchor, the soon-to-be-infamous Howard Beale, who got Americans across the land screaming out their windows that they were “mad as hell” and “not gonna take this anymore.”

 And Diana Christensen, the conniving, ratings-obsessed programming chief (a role that won Faye Dunaway her Oscar) who blurred the line between news and entertainment lives on in Billy Crudup’s portrayal of the equally Machiavellian Cory Ellison on Apple TV+’s The Morning Show.

Not only that, but Hall’s stage adaptation scored multiple Olivier and Tony nominations, and star Bryan Cranston won both awards for his performance, proof that the script can indeed work under optimal circumstances.

Minus state-of-the-art technology and design, however, its shortcomings become painfully obvious because adaptation or not, what Hall has written is essentially a screenplay composed of a whopping thirty-seven scenes, each of which requires a move to a new locale, meaning that the Group Rep audience must sit through about three-dozen instances of cast members moving furniture from here to there and there and there, each and every tedious scene change impeding the kind of momentum essential for a play like Network to work.

Director Tom Lazarus has done impressive work before in both the Group Rep’s Twelve Angry Jurors and Theatre 40’s Listing, but he seems stumped by Network’s particularly challenging demands.

Rather than finding inventive ways to eliminate as many of these time-consuming scene changes as possible (e.g., leaving certain set pieces in place even when not in use) or turning a minus into a plus by keep energy and suspense levels high with stylishly choreographed, musically underscored scene changes, Lazarus takes the easy route and simply has cast members lug stuff on and about with cutesy TV commercials for assorted household products as audio accompaniment.

As a result, the Group Rep’s Network ends up running probably fifteen or more minutes longer than it did on Broadway, dulling the impact of the performances delivered by its mostly fine cast.

Even under less than optimum circumstances, Emmett’s take on Howard Beale is a dazzler as madness takes hold of a man who probably wasn’t all that stable to begin with.

Michelle McGregor’s seductive schemer of a Diana, Larry Toffler’s Diana-obsessed philanderer of a Max Schumacher, and Tack Sappington’s killer shark of a Frank Hackett may not erase memories of Dunaway, William Holden, and Robert Duvall, but they are all three quite good in their roles.

So is Belinda Howell in her brief, intense scene as Louise Schumacher, a wife betrayed, though Fox Carney’s take on UBS head Arthur Jensen comes across simply as creepy.

Patrick Anthony, Hudson Long, Melissa Lugo, Bob McCollum, and Kevin Michael Moran do well in their featured roles in a cast completed by UBS newsroom staffers Linda Alznauer, Ken Dixon, Jr., Idelis Hernández, Angie Lin, Tom O’Shea, Stevie Stern, and Sylvie Wiley. (Though given program credit no different from their onstage counterparts, Sherrick O’Quinn, Danny Salay, Amy Shaughnessy, and Cathy Diana Tomlin appear only in a brief, prerecorded news report on a Patty Hearst-style kidnapping.)

Designs by Shon LeBlanc (costumes) Ellen Monocroussos (lighting), Sammy Strittmatter (audio/visuals) all have their pluses, but I can’t help feeling that a more experienced, imaginative scenic designer than Lazarus could have helped speed up the production’s dozens of between-scene delays.

Network is produced for the Group Rep by Stern. Dan O’Connell is sound consultant. Tomlin is production stage manager and Tori Austin is assistant stage manager. Nora Feldman is publicist.

 Entering the Group Rep on Sunday, I had a good feeling about what I was about to see given the production’s source material, its cast, and the critical success of its West End/Broadway stagings.

It quickly became clear, however, that the Group Rep had bitten off more than it could chew.

Could Network have been better executed as a 99-seat production? I believe that it could have been, but maybe only London and New York could do it the justice it deserves.

The Group Rep Theatre, 10900 Burbank Boulevard, North Hollywood. Through June 29. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00. Sundays at 2:00.
www.thegrouprep.com

–Steven Stanley
June 1, 2025
Photos: Doug Engalla

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Tags: Lee Hall, Los Angeles Theater Review, Paddy Chayefsky, The Group Rep