The notices are in for The Cherry Orchard, Simon Stone’s Korean-language reinvention of Chekhov’s last play, which opened at the Park Avenue Armory on September 16 for a ten-day run in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Stone moves the action from a Russian estate to a chaebol dynasty outside present-day Seoul, gives the play to a Korean ensemble led by Jeon Do-yeon and Park Hae-soo, and stages it inside a glass house designed by the architect Saul Kim. The company is praised almost without dissent. What divides the critics is the script: the independents call the new text fleet and funny, while the New York Times and Vulture both object that it says out loud what Chekhov left in the subtext.
The verdict: nine reviews from eight outlets so far. Only three of them carry a score — five stars from Culture Sauce, and four and three from the two critics New York Stage Review sent — while the other six publish no rating at all, which is the normal shape for a New York opening. The warmth is real but it is not unanimous. Every outlet singles out the acting, and Jeon Do-yeon and Park Hae-soo are named in all nine; the argument is over Stone’s new text, which the independents find fleet and generous and which the two biggest outlets find too eager to explain itself.
What are critics saying about The Cherry Orchard?
The New York Times
“The Cherry Orchard, in Korean, Uses Chekhov’s Title but Not His Spirit”
Reviewer: Helen Shaw
“Stone largely keeps Chekhov’s sequence of events, while transposing the action to just outside modern Seoul. The dramaturg Yi Dan-bi translated the result into Korean; the English supertitles are Stone’s own text. He collaborated with a deft ensemble of Korean actors too, but while they excel at playing the production’s often raucous comedy, they’re too frequently hampered by Stone’s conceptual changes and weird aversion to subtext. (If someone is an alcoholic, she simply says so.)”
Vulture
“Chekhov and the Chaebol: A Korean Cherry Orchard at the Armory”
Reviewer: Sara Holdren
“Stone’s production as a whole can be pretty neatly summed up by this theatrical beat: It is, overall, superbly acted — Nam Yun-ho nails the blend of fire and flimsiness that Chekhov built into the awkward, aspiring teacher-student, here named Byun Dong-lim. It also errs on the tidy side, spelling out what could be left implied, doubling down on a joke when the point is already made. Stone is determined that we get it — on his watch, our connecting the dots won’t be left to chance.”
TheaterMania
“Review: The Cherry Orchard, Reimagined by Simon Stone as a K-Drama”
Reviewer: David Gordon
“The present-day setting is what ultimately makes this Cherry Orchard so tragic. Surely, we think, the Songs will find a way to save themselves. The rich always do. Stone’s insight, however, is that the Songs mistake their history of power for a guaranteed future. Like many modern scions of inherited wealth, they cannot see the peons waiting to take their place. In this world, there are more Tom Wambsgans’ waiting in the wings than there are Shiv Roys.”
New York Stage Review
“The Cherry Orchard: Not Your Father’s Chekhov”
Reviewer: Melissa Rose Bernardo
“If you do know The Cherry Orchard, you’ll be delighted by the way Stone has molded Chekhov’s characters. At one point, Jae-young delivers an extended ode to a beloved portable record player with the tenderness one might reserve for addressing a small child; it’s by turns precious and poetic, and just a bit pitiable. If we’re wondering why he’s stuck in the past and unable to take the reins and guide his company into a fast-changing future, this is why: He’s an LP in a streaming world.”
Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s full review at New York Stage Review
Culture Sauce
“Chekhov meets Parasite in Simon Stone’s brilliant update”
Reviewer: Thom Geier
“The Swiss-born Australian director Simon Stone has earned a reputation as an innovative storyteller in both theater and film (his new feature Elsinore opens this fall). And there’s something ambitiously audacious about his unforgettable adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, a new take on Anton Chekhov’s classic that has been touring the world since its 2024 premiere in Seoul, South Korea.”
Theater Pizzazz
“A Korean Cast Blossoms in a New Cherry Orchard”
Reviewer: Ron Fassler
“Mention has not been made yet of designer Saul Kim’s beautiful transparent glass house setting, stunning to take in amidst the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory. Glass houses are a frequent motif of Stone’s stagings in which he spurs the audience to observe voyeuristically. It works well here even if it does present a major challenge for the sound designer, as much of the action takes place inside the glass.”
TheaterScene.net
“A dazzling Korean reinvention of Chekhov”
Reviewer: Tony Marinelli
“Jeon Do-yeon is magnificent as Song Do-young, the Korean Ranevskaya, entering her glass kingdom as though she were returning to a party that has been waiting indefinitely for her arrival. Jeon gives the matriarch a volatile mixture of charm, selfishness, erotic recklessness, maternal damage, and almost pathological refusal to contemplate consequences. She can turn from seduction to wounded innocence in the space of a sentence, and from hilarity to devastation without announcing the transition.”
This Week in New York
“K-Drama Meets Succession”
Reviewer: Mark Rifkin
“But I’ve never truly understood what would be Chekhov’s final play until experiencing Swiss-born Australian Simon Stone’s brilliant reimagination, which is in Korean with often difficult-to-follow supertitles. Running at Park Ave. Armory through September 26, it is a wholly original and utterly dazzling work of art.”
Also reviewed by: New York Stage Review a second time, by Michael Sommers, whose three-star companion notice calls the staging a big, bold rendition and reads the glass house as a measure of how exposed the family has become; and August Cosentino at What Does Aug Think?, who admires the cast and the stagecraft while warning that the Armory’s sightlines make the supertitles hard work.
Stone is no stranger to this building. His Yerma filled the same drill hall in 2018, and New York has since seen his Medea at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and his staging of Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence at the Metropolitan Opera. This Cherry Orchard was built at the LG Arts Center SEOUL, where it premiered in 2024, and has played Busan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia before reaching New York.
The Cherry Orchard runs at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street, through Saturday September 26, 2026. It is performed in Korean with English supertitles and runs two hours and 50 minutes with one intermission.
