On paper, the new Broadway revival of Yasmina Reza’s “Art” sounds like a winner: three Tony Award winners — Neil Patrick Harris, Bobby Cannavale, and James Corden — trading barbs in a sleek comedy about male friendship and the value of modern art. The result is hardly terrible, but it is slight. The laughs are modest, the pacing drags, and the play never builds beyond its simple conceit.

Written in French in 1994 and translated by Christopher Hampton, “Art” became an unlikely international phenomenon, running for years in London and enjoying a hit Broadway run in the late 1990s with a constantly rotating cast of celebrities. A decade later, Reza repeated her success with “God of Carnage.” I vividly remember seeing “Art” in 1999 as a teenager with a replacement cast led by George Segal and

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