Our Town Broadway Reviews

And though some of the effectiveness of the revival is clearly the result of Kenny Leon’s swift and unsentimental direction, and of a fine cast led by the mercilessly acute Jim Parsons as the Stage Manager, we must begin with wonder and admiration for the play itself. In its portrait of “the life of a village against the life of the stars,” as Wilder described it, the monumental is always expressed in the miniature, and the miniature is always crushed by the monument.

Mr. Leon’s “Our Town” is polished and marked by moments of humor and melancholy, but they do not cohere into a powerfully affecting production. For theatergoers who saw the director David Cromer’s hyper-intimate 2009 off-Broadway production—which ran for almost 650 performances, the longest run in the play’s history—its indelible impact (it ranks as one of the best theatrical productions I have seen) will inevitably lead to disappointing comparisons, unfairly or not.

Revival of Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’ is moving, emotionally stirring production. Kenny Leon’s emotionally charged revival at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre has opened with an engaging if stylistically varied cast and a swift pacing that boils a three-act play down to an intermission-less 105 minutes.

Tears were streaming down my face for much of the last half hour of this revival; perhaps you will feel the same way. But while we in the audience might weep, Wilder's view, though always sympathetic, stays clear and dry. He has a eye on the eternal.

Leon’s staging is lovely, but I found myself craving a daring challenge to the idea of convention rather than simply an inclusive version of it. Why should the picture of a “typical American life” remain so narrow? Why stuff it with more types of people rather than pull it apart? That’s a job for other storytellers — whose repudiation of norms will hopefully become the new one.

Not coincidentally, the most striking aspects of this particular production are baked into the DNA of Wilder’s timeless play. There’s something undefinable missing: perhaps a cut line that was the secret skeleton key or merely the fact of changing the pacing and losing the reality of the show’s slow simplicity. Ultimately, Wilder’s words remain the magic; the progression from a day to a wedding to a funeral a guaranteed gut punch. It is, if nothing else, a reminder that life itself ought to be thoroughly appreciated. Grade: B

Though “Our Town” runs just 105 minutes, much shorter than the original two hours and 35 minutes, the last act does drag a bit. This final chapter centers on death and what we miss out on when we’re not truly present. However, these scenes lean toward melodrama, removing some of the sharpness constructed in the play’s first two acts. Still, Leon masters the core of Wilder’s message. Life is fragile and fleeting, and love is all that matters.

That fundamental drive — that feeling of questing clarity, of the necessity of returning to an old play to excavate its glowing, undiminished heart — is what Kenny Leon’s new Broadway production lacks. It’s not painful, but it’s far from revelatory. In certain ways it treads safely down the middle of the road — gets in, gets on with it, gets it over with, and gets out. But Leon (like many post-Cromer directors of the play) also seems to be reaching for gestures to make this visit to Grover’s Corners new and different, and the flourishes wind up feeling tentative or hodgepodge-y, never coalescing.

Leon, a top-notch director who has done recent work that is both more exhilarating (Purlie Victorious) and more revelatory (Home), here makes a few attempts at diversifying and era-defying Wilder’s classic without offering a complete re-think that might have brought fresher life to the theatrical chestnut.

Leon’s “Our Town” solves that problem, in part, by not having an intermission. The Stage Manager now simply informs us that Act 1 and then Act 2 have finished, the audience applauds, and we’re off to Act 3 without a break. “Our Town” now runs 100 minutes without intermission, and I have to ask this: Would you do that to any three-act play that normally runs around two and a half hours if you were a director who considered it the best American play ever?

It should still be impossible to leave a production of “Our Town” not feeling shaken and a little wonder-struck, grateful for all the seemingly small treasures that life can offer. Mr. Leon’s aim, clearly, is to also make us wish for a better world, and as it’s relayed here, that goal doesn’t seem at all incongruous with Wilder’s vision.

So, why, if it is Our town, is director Kenny Leon’s staging of “Our Town” among the most uninvolving and anemic I have ever seen?

So here we have a sturdily functional production of the Wilder classic. But when you walk out of a revival thinking how thrilling the play was the last time you saw it—well that’s a problem, isn’t it? David Cromer’s 2009 production at the Barrow Street Theatre (and elsewhere) was vibrant, stunning and altogether unforgettable. The new Broadway production is—well, not.

At Kenny Leon’s very welcome Our Town, patrons are guaranteed to appreciate Thornton Wilder’s genius every, every minute.

Kenny Leon’s production of Our Town is – as might be his calling cards – straightforward and effective. The prolific director is well-suited to Thornton Wilder’s seminal 1938 play, which tracks the daily lives of a small New Hampshire town across twelve years as a petri dish of humanist beauty. Though Leon’s simple staging, which trims the three-act work into a 100-minute piece, could use a few more beats, it succeeds largely because of a terrifically calibrated lead performance.

Our Town, though, is a play not about death but about how to live. And if the final scene, in which Wilder tears down the shutters to stare directly at the audience, asking whether our lives have been lived less than fully, pummels across the footlights with the blistering force that it does here, Our Town has done its job. When Emily, whom Deutch, in her Broadway debut, lends a healthy balance of melancholy and cheekiness, pleads, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?,” Leon lets Wilder take us by the shoulders and shake.