Sienna Miller on Broadway: Legs 10, Acting 0

(Newser) – Critics agree on one thing when it comes to Sienna Miller’s Broadway debut: She looks hot. Her performance in After Miss Julie, however, wowed exactly no one:

• Ben Brantley was rooting for Miller from the start, but ultimately she “registers as a healthy, sane young woman with good diction, good posture, and great legs,” he writes in the New York Times. “Commendable as these attributes are, they are of limited use in portraying a tautly wound, death-courting neurotic who is eaten alive by her own demons.”

• Terry Teachout minces even fewer words: “As for Ms. Miller, a model turned second-tier movie star, all she does is stalk around the stage striking vampy poses and looking really, really skinny,” he writes in the Wall Street Journal. “I almost felt sorry for her, but the truth is that she has no more business playing a classic stage role than I have posing for the cover of Vogue.”
• “Sienna Miller looks smashing as the wayward aristocrat, but this is a complex character fraught with contradictions, and she comes off simply as a loony tart whose cat-and-mouse games careen out of control,” David Rooney of Variety says of Miller’s “shouty” performance.
• Joe Dziemianowicz is a bit kinder: “Miller, making her Broadway debut, is improbably beautiful, every inch the ‘fine-looking filly’ John calls her,” he writes in the New York Daily News. “She's committed and competent, but her performance is a shade monochromatic, not modulated enough to make Miss Julie's jagged edges sharp.”