The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (play) reception was enthusiastic, critical reception was mixed. Frank Rich in "New York Times" reported dull passages piling up as "dead weight", while John Simon in the "New York Magazine" felt that the work was a "middlebrow enterprise" doing "scant justice" to the novel. In contrast Mel Gussow, again in "The New York Times", noted that ""Nicholas Nickleby" remains true to Dickens – many of the lines are taken directly from the novel, dialogue as well as narration – and to first principles of theater" when describing the RSC's recast production in 1986. Playwright and reviewer Thomas Hischak, writing in retrospect
Nicholas Nickleby (2002 film) admirable modesty is better than that. Rather than trying to update, transform or otherwise interpret "Nickleby", he has decided to share his enthusiasm for it ... [He] has adapted [Dickens' dialogue] with a scholar's ear and a showman's flair ... [and] produced a colorful, affecting collage of Dickensian moods and motifs, a movie that elicits an overwhelming desire to plunge into 900 pages of 19th-century prose." Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" said, "The movie is jolly and exciting and brimming with life, and wonderfully well-acted." In the "San Francisco Chronicle", Mick LaSalle observed, "It took Dickens 65 chapters, and