Brustein reviews a 1987 revival of Hecht and Mac Arthur's play at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in New York. Finding that the play's potent message has endured, the critic offers a favorable review of The Front Page.

Yet another revival of The Front Page, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1928 play about Chicago newspapermen covering an execution, would not appear to be a particularly original theatrical idea or an especially bold choice to open Gregory Mosher' s second season at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater. The play has already enjoyed three movie versions one of them macerating this hard-nosed farce into a gender-reversed romantic comedy, with Rosalind Russell as a female Hildy Johnson and Gary Grant doing one of his incomparable comic turns as her editor-lover, Walter Burns. It is, besides, a regular feature of resident theater schedules in this country, and in 1972 it was even memorialized by the...