A new Broadway revival of Yasmina Reza’s play "Art," directed by Scott Ellis and starring Bobby Cannavale, James Corden and Neil Patrick Harris, opened Tuesday night at the Music Box Theatre, drawing praise for its sharp direction, precise design and the trio’s comic chemistry.
The 90-minute production places a stark white-on-white painting — now priced at $300,000 in the play’s updated currency — at the center of a dispute among three longtime friends. Cannavale plays Marc, whose exasperation and insistence on aesthetic rules fuel the argument; Harris is Serge, the owner of the painting whose purchase is read as an act of independence; and Corden plays Yvan, a hapless mediator whose vacillation marks him as the play’s moral and comic fulcrum. A review of the production noted frequent eruptions of laughter as well as the revival’s ability to probe power dynamics and microaggressions among friends.
Under Ellis’s direction, the production emphasizes precision and social friction. Designer David Rockwell outfits the stage with an elegant, spare gray living room that suggests chilly luxury but little warmth, underscoring the emotional distance among the men. The translated script by Christopher Hampton — the same translation that accompanied Reza’s original French play to Broadway — remains focused less on modern art than on the ways small slights and differences of taste can fracture relationships.
The play’s updated price tag for the painting offers an immediate, topical note: where the canvas was the equivalent of $40,000 in the 1998 production, it is presented in the revival as costing $300,000, a detail that reviewers noted as a wry nod to inflation and the escalating stakes of cultural signifiers. But the painting functions primarily as a catalyst. The characters’ arguments about the work — its authenticity, value and meaning — give way to revelations about dominance, insecurity and rivalry built up over 25 years of friendship.
Cannavale’s Marc is described as prone to outbursts and gestures that suggest dominance more than affection; Harris’s Serge shifts from needy to flinty to icy as he defends his purchase. Corden’s Yvan brings physical comedy to the role, at times literally plunging into the sofa and delivering a long, single-character monologue that earned a mid-performance ovation in the production reviewed. One scene cited for its sustained comic tension shows the men silently eating olives and dropping the pits into a bowl with a resonant metallic "ting," a moment that crystallizes the play’s mix of triviality and cruelty.
"It’s just a picture, we don’t have to get bogged down with it, life’s too short," Yvan tells his friends in one line that encapsulates the play’s insistence that small slights can carry outsized consequences because human life and time are limited. Reza’s script, which won the Tony Award for best play in 1998 in a cast led by Alan Alda, Victor Garber and Alfred Molina, returns to Broadway for the first time since that original run. Reviewers said the revival feels neither antique nor dated, but instead fresh and immediate.
The production’s strengths, as noted in coverage, lie in the interplay among the three leads and the economy of Ellis’s staging. The revival keeps the action compact and focused, allowing the shifts in tone — from farce to barbed confrontation — to land quickly. The play’s brevity and tight pacing were cited as assets that preserve the theatrical intensity of Reza’s social observations.
The revival of "Art" joins a broader Broadway season that has seen several revivals and transfers seeking to reframe celebrated plays for contemporary audiences. This production highlights how a seemingly simple premise — a plain white painting and a debate about taste — can reveal longstanding resentments and rivalries when performed by a sharply cast ensemble and mounted with controlled theatricality.