Good thing Scarlett Johansson 's Broadway debut didn't come in a musical.
While critics harshed on ScarJo's album debut a couple years back, the reviewers are positively raving about her bow on the boards in A View From the Bridge, which opened yesterday.
"It's just wonderful to watch Johansson challenge both herself and our expectations of her," says the New York Post. "[She] comes out of left field with a committed performance that's resolutely unshowy. She certainly does better by [playwright Arthur] Miller than Katie Holmes did in 2008's All My Sons."
Ben Brantley of the New York Times also juxtaposes her stage performance to that of Holmes, as well as Julia Roberts and Keira Knightley.
"Film actresses as famous as Ms. Johansson tend to create their own discomfort zones onstage, defined by the mixed expectations of fans and skeptics," he writes. "By comparison, Ms. Johansson melts into her character so thoroughly that her nimbus of celebrity disappears."
Ryan Reynolds' wife plays Catherine, a teenager who gets her uncle, a longshoreman played by Liev Schreiber, all hot and bothered. Playing the temptress isn't a new thing for Scarlett, but from the sounds of it, her subtlety is.
"Looking shapely in tight sweaters and skirts yet still girlishly oblivious to her sensuality, Johansson embodies this dilemma with touching dignity, as much in her moments of cautious distance as those of heated self-assertiveness," claims Variety.
"[She is] startlingly good," surmises the New York Daily News.
In other words, we ought to run, not walk to the Cort Theatre, because The View dims April 4.
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