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.
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.
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.
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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