The verdict on the Broadway revival of “Art” starring Neil Patrick Harris, Bobby Cannvale and James Corden as three friends who argue about art ranges from “clever and engaging” to “boring beyond belief” from regular theatergoers in the chat rooms,. With the play opening tonight, what do the invited professional critics have to say?
The consensus seems to be: Corden is the stand-out in a play that is slender if amusing.
In this production of Yasmina Reza’s 1994 play, Serge (Neil Patrick Harris) has bought an expensive ($300,000) all-white painting, which outrages his friend Marc (Bobby Cannavale) while Yvan (James Corden) tries to serve as peacemaker to his two friends, which irritates both of them. The aesthetic debate escalates into an airing of grievances and resentments about their 25-year friendship. Debuting on Broadway in 1998 in the same translation by Christopher Hampton now being used, the play offered an argument about modern art that even then “was more than a little passé,” as more than one critic point out below.
Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: “Art” is not about art, and it’s not really about friendship. If it’s about anything at all, the Broadway revival of Yasmina Reza’s 30-year-old play is about the celebrity of Bobby Cannavale, James Corden and Neil Patrick Harris…All three actors are familiar faces on TV, each with enough fans apparently willing to pay a top ticket price upwards of $500,….All three are also experienced stage actors, deft at generating laughs from a squabble that has no credible stakes, and projecting a feeling of camaraderie among characters who seem to share nothing in common…
Elizabeth Vincentelli, New York Times: All three are fine, and Corden — back on Broadway for the first time since his whirlwind of a performance in “One Man, Two Guvnors” in 2012 — is often a lot more than that. But for an elegantly vicious play that’s meant to draw pearls of blood, the actors, especially Cannavale and Harris, can come off as guarded, as if they’re fencing with blunted tips…At times, Scott Ellis’s production, at the Music Box Theater, feels like an extended episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”…Leaving the Music Box, I looked at the ticket prices posted over the box office and started imagining hypothetical conversations about whether an orchestra seat for this “Art” is worth $500.
Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: a slender but amusing 90-minute evening of Broadway entertainment. Is it art? Maybe not. But why argue?
Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post: a slim, one-joke, pseudo-intellectual affair that gratingly and exhaustingly works to send up fellow pseudo intellectuals.
Mark Kennedy, AP: Under Scott Ellis’ tight and enthralling direction and with three perfectly cast actors who seem to be having a ball at the Music Box Theatre, “Art” frequently erupts in laughter but still has plenty to say about friendship, power dynamics and how we get on each others’ nerves
Greg Evans, Deadline: Director Scott Ellis seems to know when to let his talented cast enjoy themselves, and if the pacing in the first half-hour or so feels a bit sluggish, well, that’s mostly on the playwright. The play’s conceits – about modern art, about interpersonal resentments, about something that might nowadays be called toxic masculinity – just don’t seem as novel as they might once have.
Daniel d’Addario, Variety: James Corden’s turn as the wobbliest vertex of a friendship triangle would, alone, make the new production of this slippery social satire worth seeing. Happily, though, the play’s depths reward a second look
Robert Hofler, The Wrap: Even in 1998, modern art and psychiatry were joked about relentlessly in TV network sitcoms. No matter, there was Reza, the premiere maker of boulevard comedies at the time, more than ready to run those two subjects through the laugh wringer one more time
Adrain Horton, The Guardian: it skirts the edge of wearisome – if not for three solid performances and the timeless insight of Reza’s script
