It’s easy to see why Yasmina Reza’s Tony-winning comedy Art has been revived on Broadway. The play offers three juicy comedic roles for actors, with one of them provided the opportunity for the sort of bring-down-the-house comedic monologue of which awards are made. It’s a tight 90 minutes, meaning nobody has to work that hard, including the audience. And it delivers not only a very funny commentary on the pretensions of modern art but also a trenchant seriocomic look at the fragility of friendships and the machinations sometimes necessary to maintain them.
Does that make Art art? No, not really. The play’s mechanical gears whirr all too loudly, and it has a patness that makes it not linger in the mind. But in the hands of three talented performers — in this case Bobby Cannavale, James Corden, and Neil Patrick Harris — and a skillful director such as Scott Ellis, it makes for a highly entertaining evening.
Set in Paris, the comedy of bad manners concerns the uncomfortable aftermath that occurs when Serge (Harris), a well-heeled, art-loving dermatologist, purchases a modern art painting for $300,000. He proudly shows it off to his friend Marc (Cannavale), who’s aghast to discover that the supposed work of genius is merely white paint on a canvas. Serge is understandably frustrated by Marc’s inability to see what he sees. “You’re not in the right place. Look at it from this angle,” he urges. “Can you see the lines?”
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Well, no, Marc can’t. Nor can he understand his friend’s folly. And he’s not shy about expressing it. “You paid three hundred thousand dollars for this shit?” he asks incredulously.
Marc seeks an ally in the form of their mutual buddy Yvan (Corden), the only working-class member of the trio. But while Yvan shares Marc’s opinion of the pretentiousness of it all, especially when he hears the cost of the painting, he’s easygoing enough to accept it.
“All the same,” he finally says after listening to Marc rant for a while. “If it makes him happy…he can afford it.”
But when the three men make plans to see a movie and Yvan shows up 45 minutes late, the tensions in their friendship, exacerbated by Marc’s outrage over the painting, flare up in hilarious fashion. Before that happens, Yvan bursts into a hysterical monologue about the family drama complications of his upcoming wedding arrangements. Delivered by Corden with the same comedic bravura he displayed in his Tony-winning role in One Man, Two Governors, it’s the highlight of the evening.
But there are plenty of laughs beside that, thanks to the playwright’s gift for wittily edgy dialogue and incisive characterizations, similarly displayed in her other Tony Award-winning play, God of Carnage, another feast for actors. Not everything flows seamlessly – whenever one of the characters steps up to address the audience directly, it seems to stop the play cold. But the evening mostly whizzes along with the air of a sophisticated, modern-day boulevard comedy.
The three performers mesh together beautifully, with Harris providing just the right haughty snobbishness, Cannavale making comic exasperation into an art form, and Corden so lovable and vulnerable you can almost forget how nasty he can be to waiters in real life. Ellis keeps the proceedings moving like a Swiss watch, the precision of his staging well matched by David Rockwell chic set, Linda Cho’s casually elegant costumes, Jen Schriever’s modernistic lighting design, and Kid Harpoon’s subtle music score.
Art opened September 16, 2025, at the Music Box Theatre and runs through December 21. Tickets and information: artonbroadway.com
