Our Town review: Bland Broadway revival starring Jim Parsons and Katie Holmes doesnt hit home

The new Broadway revival of “Our Town,” which opened Thursday night at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, puts all its chips on “Our.”One hour and 45 minutes, with no intermission.At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W 47th Street.Its cast is more diverse than any production of Thornton Wilder’s classic play you’re likely to have seen, and the actors begin by singing a variety of religious songs — Christian, Jewish, Islamic.The Catholic one, “On Eagle’s Wings,” was released more than 70 years after the show’s 1901 setting.

You see? You’re at Our town.Similarly, in the “Love and Marriage” second act, newlyweds Emily Webb (Zoey Deutch) and George Gibbs (Ephraim Sykes) walk down the aisle, not to Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” but to “Lost Without You” by BeBe and CeCe Winans.Oh, it’s Our town, all right.The crowd has always been a character in Wilder’s forward-thinking play.

The all-seeing Stage Manager, played by Jim Parsons, speaks directly to us on a mostly bare stage about the ho-hum daily routines of the people of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire: births, deaths, marriages, the paperboy’s route, the breakfast menu, the kids’ homework. But at the Barrymore, our role is amped up.Several rows of audience members are seated on the stage, and the cast makes many entrances through the orchestra aisles, stomping past ticket-buyers.

Lest you forget that you’re watching Our town.So, why, if it is Our town, is director Kenny Leon’s staging of “Our Town” among the most uninvolving and anemic I have ever seen?Because the basics have been overlooked.Despite the random contemporary touches, the actors get so mired in “gee willikers!” nostalgia and drippy sentimentality Wilder’s script does not call for that playgoers cease to connect to anybody.Scenes are, at once, overacted — like an olde tyme park — and underacted, with nary a believable or grounded moment to speak of.The ensemble, including Katie Holmes as...