The Last Night of Ballyhoo was originally commissioned by the Alliance Theatre Company for presentation at Atlanta's 1996 Olympic Arts Festival. It immediately drew an appreciative audience, including Michael Sommers, who introduced the play to the American Theater Critics Association (ACTA) prize-awarding committee. According to Sommers, The Last Night of Ballyhoo was full of "tasty regional talk, seriocomic situations, and well-crafted realistic form." The Last Night of Ballyhoo went on to win an ACTA citation as an outstanding new play.

In 1997, The Last Night of Ballyhoo opened on Broadway, and the majority of theater critics responded as favorably as earlier audiences had. Greg Evans called it a "winning new play" in Variety and made special note of the "wonderfully crafted script." Richard Zoglin pointed out in Time, "Uhry juggles a lot of elements with no evident strain, creating a believable family that seems both quirky and emblematic...