It doesn’t take a refined intellect to separate the bad characters from the good in Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes.” The bad tend to be scheming, grasping and spiteful, and maybe mean to animals, too. The good? Less interested in getting their hands on piles of money, generally warm-spirited, and opposed to hunting poor critters for sport.
The director Daniel Sullivan’s succulent new Broadway revival of the play, a Manhattan Theatre Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, cannot erase its tints of both moralizing and melodrama. But it proves once again that Hellman’s 1939 drama is also redoubtably enduring entertainment, a theatrically effective indictment of human greed and its destructive power.