While finding some fault in the casting of the lead roles, this critic still contends that The Front Page has endured as a powerful dramatic work, one that is borne out in this 1986 revival.

Whenever The Front Page is revived, reviewers feel an obligation to apologize for liking the play, and I am no exception. It is indeed a ramshackle affair, flung together with more scaffolding than structure and containing more funny lines than clever ones, but there is also at the heart of its pretense of heartlessness an air of youthful, ignorant high spirits that we cannot fail to find endearing. If its authors, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, had known more about writing plays, they would surely have written a worse one; like two literary Elizas, they keep leaping from one shaky ice floe of plot to the next, always in peril of their lives...