Reviews for the original Broadway production were mixed. Clive Barnes of the New York Post called Brighton Beach Memoirs Simon's "best play yet" but also "a slight disappointment" because the playwright "always pulls back from the jugular."[24] Frank Rich of the New York Times judged the play to be "a pleasant evening" that "never quite stops being nice and starts being either consistently involving or entertaining."[11] Nevertheless, the play was popular with Broadway audiences and had a long and successful run. When the play was not nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play, producer Emanuel Azenberg called the snub "an outrageous injustice" and "a personal insult," and Variety published an editorial declaring "Neil Simon Deserves Better."[13] In 1983 Dolores Dolan of The New York Times said that after it achieved popularity on Broadway, the community of Brighton Beach "attracted some notice" when it had historically "receive[d] little attention".[25]
The New York Times, in analyzing the failure of the 2009 Broadway revival of Brighton Beach Memoirs, wrote that "What went wrong with 'Brighton Beach Memoirs' is a case study in success and failure on Broadway today. There were no big stars like Jude Law in the current commercial hit 'Hamlet,' there was no marketing campaign that framed the Simon play as a can’t-miss theatrical event, and there was no wow factor that brought the period piece to life, like the breakneck pacing of the popular farce 'Boeing-Boeing' last year. But the failure also reflects America’s evolving sense of humor and taste... It actually received good reviews, but the play was shuttered because people, for whatever reason, did not want to see the Simon show about a Depression-era family laughing through the tears. The show cost $3 million to produce but never grossed more than $125,000 a week in ticket sales during preview performances — or 15 percent of the maximum possible — an amount that did not even cover running costs."[26]
