Starring four-time Emmy Award® winner Jim Parsons, Our Town returns to Broadway for the first time in over 20 years. Hailed by Edward Albee as “the greatest American play ever written,” Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic will shine in a momentous new production. Directed by Tony Award® winner Kenny Leon (Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch, Topdog/Underdog, A Raisin in the Sun), this is an Our Town for our time.
In Wilder’s timeless tale of a small town, a stage manager narrates the daily lives of its locals, depicts a childhood friendship turn into marriage, and sets the stage for magnificent truths of what it means to be alive. Don’t miss this strictly limited engagement of an essential American classic.
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.
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.
1938 | Broadway |
Broadway |
1944 | Broadway |
Broadway |
1969 | Broadway |
Broadway |
1988 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2002 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2009 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway Revival Off-Broadway |
2017 | Regional (US) |
Benefit Reading Production Regional (US) |
2019 | West End |
Regent's Park Open Air Theatre London Revival West End |
2024 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Production Broadway |
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