The latest revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s landmark update of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, finally held its press opening this week, and the reviews are decidedly mixed.

The major Mixmaster? New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, who totally eviscerated the new Broadway production:

Fugue for Wrung-Out Tinhorns

The fight has gone out of the once-robust boys from “Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of sharks in a small pond. Sure, they still curse and rant and beat up on the furniture in the production that formally opened at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Saturday night, after an indecently extended preview period.

These hack real estate salesmen also slam doors hard enough to make walls tremble. They mug their way through their foul-mouthed monologues in a style that begs for (and receives) applause. The eldest of their tribe, and this production’s pacesetter, is portrayed by a grizzled Al Pacino with the exaggerated pantomiming of a boozy player in a late-night charades game.

Yet somehow their hearts just don’t seem to be into the business of scamming clients and stabbing one another in the back. It’s as if all the competitive fierceness had been sucked from them by some cosmic super-vacuum cleaner — a product that these forlorn hustlers probably wouldn’t be able to persuade anyone to buy. As salesmen, they’re as worn down and wrung out as Willy Loman at twilight.

(To be fair about it, Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout called the production “a hugely successful revival.”)

Regardless, the Missus and I are plenty glad we saw the 2005 Broadway production with Alan Alda and Liev Schreiber, which Brantley liked a lot more.

You probably would have too.