Our Town
Opening Night: October 10, 2024
Theater: Barrymore Theatre
Website: www.ourtownbroadway.com
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. Now in performances at the Barrymore Theatre.
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October 11, 2024
The production is almost too set on overwhelming the audience, even pumping the homey smells of flowers and bacon into the theater. But none of this intensity is actually matched by the emotional engagement of any character onstage, so the attempts at hyperreal sensations seem awkward, confusing, even desperate.
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October 10, 2024
The revival that opened Thursday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, the fifth on Broadway since the play’s 1938 debut, is more than good enough. To use this word in the only positive sense I can imagine, it’s unbearable: in its beauty, yes, but more so in its refusal to offer beauty as a cure when it is only, at best, a comfort.
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October 10, 2024
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.
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October 10, 2024
Jim Parsons brings a wounded gravitas to the role of the Stage Manager that’s perfectly tailored to our end-of-times moment; not so much an authoritative power guiding us through the cosmos of existence, but a weary, wondrous god contemplating and coping with his creation. His narration is clean and often funny, in Parson’s slightly undercutting way, and plumbs moments of deep poignancy, as when he appears to choke up when paraphrasing “what one of those European fellas said: every child born into the world is nature’s attempt to make a perfect human being.”
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October 10, 2024
It takes a great deal of work to make the ordinary enticing, but that’s precisely what director Kenny Leon does in his production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Our Town.”
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October 10, 2024
I haven’t heard that much sobbing from an audience since The Notebook, and the emotional impact is a testament to the power of the play and this production. No need to bother with a cornerstone. Our Town is here to stay.
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October 10, 2024
“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?
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October 10, 2024
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 an eye on the eternal.
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Fimmano
October 10, 2024
With a star-studded cast featuring actors of all races, ages, and abilities, the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, comes to life in an evocative way. Tony Award-winning director Kenny Leon’s vision for the play is to emphasize how human trials and tribulations are universal, no matter the time period or walk of life.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 10, 2024
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.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 10, 2024
It could be said that Leon is offering an Our Town “for our time,” as the saying goes, a time when a seriously threatened democracy has generated a nation-wide longing for unity across racial lines.
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October 10, 2024
Despite the random contemporary touches, the actors get so mired in “gee willikers!” nostalgia and drippy sentimentality Wilder’s script does not call for that playgoers cease to connect to anybody.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 10, 2024
The most winning aspect of Wilder’s play is its warmth. Leon preserves this, as do his actors. Zoey Deutch, making her Broadway debut, is as instantly likable as ever.
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October 10, 2024
The production’s signature contribution to the Our Town legacy is a chancy meld of historical eras and cast demographics. The latter works well, with a mix of ethnicities and religions speaking cogently to the universality of Wilder’s tale… A later outburst of a modern-sounding smooth R&B gospel duet is more jarring than compelling, and the same might be said of Dede Ayite’s costume design.
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