["Sly Fox"] is billed as an adaptation of Ben Jonson's "Volpone," but it is welcomely much more than that. The adapter, Larry Gelbart, is temperamentally closer to the Marx Brothers than he is to Jonson; his dialogue has the nervous quickness of early Groucho, with Groucho's unpredictable free-associational asides and his bent for the reasonable-outrageous…. Gelbart has caused the classical shapeliness of Jonson's plot to explode into harum-scarum twentieth-century show biz; anything goes. The stage becomes a minefield of gags, visual and oral, which detonate continuously and without warning. One is helpless not to laugh in the presence of so much sheer energy of tomfoolery….

Brendan Gill, "The Triumph of Avarice," in The New Yorker (© 1976 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. LII, No. 45, December 27, 1976, p. 52.∗