The Rose Tattoo, which was a box-office success on Broadway, followed two other major Broadway successes for Williams, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. The play's popularity with the public garnered it a Tony Award, with critics, on the whole, seeing it as a less successful play than the two previous successes.

William Hawkins's mixed review is typical of critical reaction following the play's Broadway opening. Writing for the New York World-Telegram and The Sun, he states that in "its favor the play has atmosphere and warmth." Yet, he writes, "the humor often seems glued to the surface, and passages of the play are endlessly chatty and repetitious." Other critics thought the play's bawdy humor worked awkwardly with its other, more serious intentions, or that the comedy was crude as opposed to bawdy. According to Margaret Marshall writing for the Nation, the play descends...