The Imaginary Invalid
Opening Night: October 22, 2026
Theater: Todd Haimes Theatre
Website: www.roundabouttheatre.org
Tony Award® winner Bill Irwin returns to Broadway (and to Molière) with his new adaptation of The Imaginary Invalid, a comedy about money, medicine, and marital mayhem. Perpetual patient Argan obsesses over his every ailment, and schemes to marry off his daughter to a doctor to save on medical bills. But she has another life in mind. With a fearless ensemble directed by Broadway veteran Brandon J. Dirden, this production is about to prove that real life is what happens while you and your family are making other plans.
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October 22, 2026
Dirden’s exquisite production, though, is both amusing and wise. They will tell you at the door that it takes 90 minutes, but really that time vanishes in a swirl — of beautiful fabrics, sweet music, precisely timed jokes and the occasional “uh-oh” facial expression from Argan as he realizes he needs the loo.
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October 22, 2026
As a New Yorker headline rightly reminded us just this week, Bill Irwin is “The OG Clown.” The legendary performer is also a perfect fit to portray self-pitying hypochondriac Monsieur Argan in Molière’s farcical comedy The Imaginary Invalid, now receiving an enjoyable revival under the auspices of Roundabout Theatre Company. But if you’re looking for evidence of Irwin’s masterful physical talent, his ability to mime, contort and twist his body into pretzels, you’ll find sadly little of it in director Brandon J. Dirden’s straightforward staging.
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October 22, 2026
Irwin’s adaptation might have easily lent itself to the style of a Carol Burnett skit if Dirden had loosened the reins and let the camp horses run. But there’s no cohesive comedic sensibility here to unite the actors in Molière’s loony world of lovers and charlatans. I would have given my left tonsil to see Ashmanskas break character with Delgado, à la Harvey Korman and Tim Conway.
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October 22, 2026
Irwin knows how to clown an audience, and in this enjoyable, broadly comic interpretation, the buffoonery is at least as much the point as some pointed critiques of modern-day American health care.
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October 22, 2026
If this production fails to amuse, except in spurts, it isn’t the fault of Molière in general or even this play in particular: Off Broadway’s Red Bull Theater mounted an excellent account of it just last year, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and starring Mark-Linn Baker. The problem is that Irwin and director Brandon J. Dirden try to extend the play’s metatheatrical resonance into an organizing principle, and a message that, paradoxically, takes its own comedy very seriously indeed.
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October 22, 2026
Perhaps the audience in the Todd Haimes Theatre imagined that they had laryngitis. Because the laughs certainly did not flow freely at the recent performance of Molière’s “The Imaginary Invalid” I sat through.
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October 22, 2026
This revival of “The Imaginary Invalid,” which opened Thursday at the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theatre, has a bad case of anemia despite Brandon J. Dirden directing the Moliere classic as if it were a screwball comedy. The extravagant costumes, by Karen Perry, would be considered excessive for even the silliest of Rossini’s comic operas.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 22, 2026
A deluxe affair, Roundabout’s rendition of Moliere’s comedy is just what the doctor ordered to brighten autumn in New York.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 22, 2026
If laughter is the best medicine, The Imaginary Invalid, which just opened on Broadway at the Todd Haimes Theatre, should cure almost anything that ails you.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 22, 2026
I initially found myself resisting all of Irwin’s melodious line readings, the vowel elongations, the facial contortions and the physical squirming. But in the end Irwin, truly one of a kind at the age of 76, mostly won me over on the grounds that this is a comedy with an unsympathetic and mostly immobile central character, so something, or someone, has to compensate and liven things up. And it’s all so deeply, fully and confidently realized.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 22, 2026
Though this new production, adapted by Bill Irwin and directed by Brandon J. Dirden, makes passing references to AI and wellness culture, the 90-minute show emerges as dull as a medical waiting room… There’s a basic lack of urgency or energy on stage. The ensemble ambles around in search of its contemporary parallels, forgetting to animate the moment the characters are already in. Despite its relevance and potential for loony chaos, this Invalid, much like its protagonist, might need a second opinion.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 22, 2026
Overall, it works. You may find yourself smiling in acknowledgement of the cast’s work more than laughing outright. That’s partly because Irwin seems more comfortable in the rare moments of clowning, including a bit of hat work performed at the show’s end, than in delivering a lead performance that relies mostly on his verbal skills. But he’s surrounded by a cast of zanies who elevate material that’s ultimately time-tested if not timeless. In the end, The Imaginary Invalid makes a mountain of laughs out of a centuries-old Molière hill.
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October 22, 2026
Irwin, who also adapted Molière’s comedy from a translation by Doug Skinner, has Buster Keaton’s long, malleable face and elastic limbs, along with half a century of expertise in just about every mode of hangdog funny-man antics, from commedia dell’arte to Beckett.
READ THE REVIEWOctober 22, 2026
Mr. Dirden has in turn surrounded his star with a collection of established and rising players, all facile, and the resulting production of “Invalid” is as much fun to watch as it surely was to rehearse. With assists from costume designer Karen Perry and movement director Lorenzo Pisoni, Messrs. Irwin and Dirden have made the physically driven prologue an elegant showcase for Mr. Irwin’s enduring agility and grace in that arena.
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October 23, 2026
If Bill Irwin is going to adapt Molière’s 17th-century comédie-ballet “The Imaginary Invalid” and portray the titular hypochondriac, one can only hope he’s going to do it in decidedly Irwinian fashion. That is: with a healthy helping of vaudevillian verve and humanist insight.
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