Weird -- The Daniel Radcliffe Story

With the Tony Awards ceremony, dedicated to honoring the best of Broadway, coming closer—it’s scheduled for 8 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, June 16—I’m looking forward, as always, to catching glimpses of stage magic. One huge difference between movies and live theatre is that anyone can watch a hit movie, whether in a cineplex or (increasingly) over cable. To see a theatrical hit with its opening night cast intact, you generally need to travel to New York City and pay hundreds of dollars for your seat. Since I can’t often do that, I’m forced to live vicariously through theatre reviews and through the snippets performed on primetime TV in the course of the Tony show.

 Invariably, some of the top nominated plays are headlined by stars best known for their work in Hollywood films. This year’s nominees include such lead performers as Liev Schreiber, Michael Stulberg, Jessica Lange, Sarah Paulson, Rachel McAdams, and Eddie Redmayne, hailed for his performance as the eerie emcee in a revival of Cabaret. But I was especially tickled by the inclusion of Daniel Radcliffe for his supporting turn in the revival of one of my favorite Sondheim musicals, Merrily We Roll Along.

 Radcliffe, now 34 (can it be?) is of course best known as the title character in all 8 Harry Potter films, bringing to convincing life the bespectacled young hero in J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular series of fantasy novels. In 2001, when not yet in his teens, he became an international superstar as the plucky and magical Harry. For many actors, being identified with an iconic character ultimately leads to career death: no one is willing to see them try on other roles. But after a full decade of playing Harry, Radcliffe has managed to move beyond his most famous characterization, both on the screen and on stage. In film and on television, the diminutive Radcliffe seems to have headed straight for the oddball roles, like that of a talkative corpse in the surrealistic Swiss Army Man (2016), the first film by the two Daniels who went on to win Oscars for Everything Everywhere All At Once. I managed to miss that, but can enthusiastically recommend Radcliffe’s Emmy-nominated performance as Weird Al Yankovic in 2022’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a curly ‘fro out to there, Radcliffe is hilarious as the writer of goofy parody songs who plays the accordion, romances Madonna, and foils the schemes of a South American drug lord.

 Starting in 2007, on stage in London, Radcliffe shook off his Harry Potter image by appearing as the deeply troubled Alan Strang in Equus, a play that required of him a strange and graphic nude scene. For Broadway, he remained covered up as the leading man in the satiric musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, playing the song-and-dance role once made famous by Robert Morse and then revived by Matthew Broderick. His current Broadway gig, Merrily We Roll Along, casts him as the writing partner of a hotshot composer who squanders his musical talent on his way to fame and fortune. There’s a marvelous Sondheim score, of course, featuring a vicious rant for the much put-upon character played by Radcliffe (and, not so long ago, by Lin-Manuel Miranda). Now he’s up for a Tony, as are the other two members of the show’s central trio. No, I haven’t seen this staging of a play that was once a big Sondheim flop but is now a really hot ticket. But I can’t help rooting for Daniel Radcliffe: there’s something magic about him.

 Update from 6/17: An emotional Daniel Radcliffe took home the Tony last night. 

 

 

Romancing the Lost City (or Do Romance Novelists Have More Fun?)

A recent airline trip gave me a good excuse to catch up with The Lost City,  a much-touted new action comedy in which a reclusive romance novelist finds herself south of the border, fighting off bad guys and finding true love. Starring Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, with assists from Daniel Radcliffe (as a weird baddie) and Brad Pitt, it makes a running joke of the low-cut and sparkly fuchsia jumpsuit in which the heroine is kidnapped, and in which she eventually finds herself sprinting through tropical rainforests and plunging down waterfalls. There’s also fun in the fact that Tatum’s character, initially a cover model in a Fabio-like long blond wig, turns out to be less a dashing swashbuckler and more a sensitive guy with a crush on his favorite author.

 The whole thing was enjoyable airplane viewing, but it made me think back to the original film that successfully blended Latin American adventure with comedy and romance. Of course I mean 1984’s Romancing the Stone, starring Michael Douglas (who also produced) and Kathleen Turner.  Both were near the start of their acting careers at the time. Douglas, son of Kirk, was best known for starring as a homicide inspector in TV’s The Streets of San Francisco and for producing (but not appearing in) the Oscar-winning One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He began as simply the producer of Romancing the Stone, before deciding to take on the role of the film’s gutsy though slightly goofball vagabond hero.  Turner had leapt into the public consciousness as bad-girl Matty Walker in Body Heat(1981). and was mostly being typecast as a femme fatale. Romancing the Stone gave her a chance to stretch as a dreamy, introverted romance novelist who finds herself in over her head after being summoned to the jungles of Colombia. Another member of the cast is Danny DeVito, Douglas’s former roommate and longtime pal, as an inept rogue also vying to find the priceless emerald that is the film’s McGuffin.

 A young Robert Zemeckis directed with a light touch, just one year before he became a big man in Hollywood following the release of Back to the Future. But for me the essential part of the team was the film’s screenwriter, Diane Thomas. Thomas enjoyed a Cinderella sort of career in Hollywood, but one lacking a happy ending. She was working as a Malibu waitress, and studying screenwriting through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program (which employs me to this day) when she managed to slip a copy of Romancing the Stone to Michael Douglas. He read it, loved its razzle-dazzle spirit, and the rest is movie history. The film’s success led to other projects, including the chance to write an Indiana Jones sequel for Steven Spielberg. Alas, in 1985 she was riding with boozy friends on Pacific Coast Highway in the Porsche gifted to her by Douglas when a terrible accident ended her life. For years, UCLA Extension hosted a student screenwriting competition in her memory.

 Is Romancing the Stone better than The Lost City? That’s hard to say, story-wise. It has no shocking pink “disco-ball” glitter garb, no Fabio-lookalike, and no outrageous Daniel Radcliffe, though it does boast a  plethora of crocodiles. Perhaps the big difference between the two is that the earlier film doesn’t seem to be trying quite so hard to give us a rollicking good time. Still, I’m not sure Douglas is right in saying that Romancing the Stone invented a genre that had never before been tried. Maybe it's worth mentioning The African Queen?