[Ring Round the Moon] is a typical bittersweet Anouilh confection: a dizzy farandole laced with bitterness, sarcasm, despair, capriciously manipulated into a deliberately preposterous happy ending. It is the precise fairy-tale method: after monstrous cruelties, a magically blissful forever-after. But as Anouilh handles them, the lacerating ironies and heart-splintering witticisms are meant to remind us how painful, indeed deadly, this game would be if it were real; how grateful we must be to the theater for being merely theater. Life in this comedy is present by its absence: we are allowed to luxuriate in an elegant distaste for living that goes up in epigrammatic fireworks, in outrageous plot twists turned as anodyne as wild beasts domesticated by art. (p. 62)

John Simon, in New York Magazine (copyright © 1975 by News Group Publications, Inc.; reprinted with the permission of New York Magazine), July 21, 1975.