John Mason Brown wrote in the "New York Post": "It is not often in our lifetime that we are privileged to enjoy the pleasant sensation of feeling that the present and the future have met for a few triumphant hours... Yet it was this very sensation—this uncommon sensation of having the present and future meet; eye-witnessing the kind of event to which we will be looking back with pride in the years to come—that forced its warming way, I suspect, into the consciousness of many of us last night as we sat spellbound. Miss Cornell's Juliet is luscious and charming. It finds her at her mellowest and most glamorous. It burns with the intensity Miss Cornell brings to all her acting. It moves gracefully and lightly; it is endlessly haunting in its pictorial qualities; and reveals a Miss Cornell who equals the beauty of the lyric lines she speaks with a new-found lyric beauty of her own voice... To add that it is by all odds the most lovely and enchanting Juliet our present-day theatre has seen is only to toss it the kind of superlative it honestly deserves." Later, the same critic determined that this role was a turning point in her career, as it meant that she could finally leave the "trifling scripts" of her earlier career and could meet the challenging demands of the greatest classic roles.