Some of Gelbart's dialogue [in Sly Fox] is good trapeze work, some of it is only moderately clever….

[Most] of the time I just watched the patterns being made, pretty decently, and didn't laugh. Partly this is because Jonson's comic morality play has been thinned into farce. It just isn't a farce plot, it's the scaffolding for a savage indictment. More, farce has to be believable in its own landscape in order to be funny, and I just couldn't believe that these were the shenanigans of 19th-century San Franciscans. The whole thing smells of wrench and discomfort.

Stanley Kauffmann, "Version Territory" (reprinted by permission of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc.; copyright © 1977 by Stanley Kauffmann), in The New Republic, Vol. 176, No. 3, January 15, 1977, p. 24.∗