The original cast of 'Seminar' takes a bow (Getty)

Despite rave reviews for Alan Rickman and the cast of Theresa Rebeck's caustic comedy of literature and sex, Seminar, the Broadway show shuttered last Sunday in a whimper, not a bang. This blow came one month after an almost complete turnover in the cast, with new members Justin Long, Zoe Lister-Jones, and Jeff Goldblum taking over from Hamish Linklater, Lily Rabe, and Mr. Rickman, respectively.

Seminar, a five-person play about privileged creative writing students receiving private lessons from a washed-up, curmudgeonly ex-literary superstar named Leonard, may have suffered with the casting overhaul, though an insider told The New York Observer that the show was axed after receiving zero Tony nominations. (Though it has been nominated as Best Play of the 2011/2012 Season by the Outer Critics Circle and The Drama League.)

Jeff Goldblum in 'Seminar' (Brian Higbee)

In a black leather jacket and a faded pink Thelonious Monk shirt, Mr. Goldblum looked astonishingly young for a man who will be turning 60 this year. But the bigger surprise was his candor about his career. After becoming an unlikely sex symbol in the ’80s and ’90s for movies like Jurassic Park, Independence Day and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Mr. Goldblum had fallen into semi-obscurity in the new millennium—popping up in the occasional indie film (Igby Goes Down, The Life Aquatic) or Broadway show (Pillowman), but mostly languishing in a number of unremarkable flops.

“In fact, I think Leonard actually likes teaching,” Mr. Goldblum continued, as it dawned on us that he wasn’t talking about himself at all, but his character in Theresa Rebeck’s Broadway play, Seminar, a role he’s set to take over from Alan Rickman on April 3. Leonard is a caustic, lascivious, ex-literary superstar begrudgingly teaching a private creative writing class to five precocious youngsters, whose aspirations range from getting a story in The New Yorker to getting a topless profile in New York magazine.

The actor and the subject share more than a couple character traits. Much like Leonard, Mr. Goldblum is resurfacing after a career comedown. And like Leonard, he’s appealing not so much to his own demographic but to a younger generation, having popped up in a string of cult comedies in recent years, including the animated Adult Swim series Tom Goes to the Mayor, the semi-improvised FX sitcom The League and IFC’s Portlandia. In addition to a brief stint as the lead on Law & Order: Criminal Intent last year, he has a recurring role as Rachel Berry’s homosexual father on Glee, and is now set to play Sarah Silverman’s ex-boyfriend on her newly-announced comedy for NBC, Susan 313. Oh, and he appears in the occasional FunnyorDie sketch. In the latest, he plays a “dunkologist” who tells L.A. Clipper Blake Griffin that a Kia Optima could dunk over him, easy.

The actor was waving his index fingers in little circles in our direction. Over the course of a lengthy lunch, we learned that this is the signal Mr. Goldblum gives when it is someone else’s turn to talk.

“Have you ever been to L.A.?” he asked.

Since one of Seminar’s big themes is telling the hard truth, we decided to answer Mr. Goldblum honestly. We hated L.A., we told him. Everyone was like his character in Annie Hall: spiritually smug Namaste yoga-ites who can’t leave the house without their mantra.

“Mmm-hmmm. So in general, you aren’t a fan of ‘Namaste, yoga stuff?’” Mr. Goldblum asked slowly. You don’t want Jeff Goldblum asking you something slowly. It’s very intimidating. It’s also a technique he is sure to deploy frequently in his new role, which Alan Rickman played with a certain Professor Snape-ian sneer.

We were wondering after seeing the show how Mr. Goldblum could ever pull off that kind of intimidating presence. But as he raised an eyebrow over our coffees (his: black; ours: mocha with whipped cream), it was clear that wouldn’t be a problem. We soon learned that the actor himself was from L.A. and was very much a “Namaste yoga-ite”—he’s been practicing since his late teens, and meditates regularly. In the ’80s, Mr. Goldblum was among a handful of devoted celebrity disciples of Swami Satchidananda, founder of Integral Yoga International.

We backpedaled. “Not that everyone from L.A. is like that! We’re just cynical about people who need to flaunt their serenity.” Ominously, the actor had stopped talking. We were five minutes into the interview.

“Actually, we just wanted to let you know that we remember you from Annie Hall,” we continued, feigning a certain jocularity. That got a smile. “Of course, that was after you played Freak Number One in Charles Bronson’s Death Wish, which most people forget was your first screen role …”

Mr. Goldblum was just staring at us. It was getting intense.

We mumbled something about we had been in love with him ever since we saw Jurassic Park 12 times at the dollar theater.

That got him talking again.

“That’s really great!” he replied, suddenly thawing out. Another thing Mr. Goldblum shared with Leonard: a certain propensity for flirting with young women (or that’s how it seemed to us). The last person Mr. Goldblum was linked to romantically in the press was Lydia Hearst-Shaw—who is 32 years his junior—and he seemed eager to market himself as an older sex symbol. If so, it’s certainly working.

“Jeff is a sexy guy,” said Seminar’s director, Sam Gold, “and I think he’s a great romantic partner for some of the characters in the play.” The only two women in Seminar are recent college graduates, but Mr. Gold had a point.

Mr. Goldblum denied any conscious strategy to appeal to a younger demo. “I’m lucky to have gotten these few opportunities recently, but it’s not a plan, it’s not an agenda, no,” he said, before attaching an addendum. “But I always think it’s not a coincidental thing.”
But there is no doubt he’s entered a different stage in his career, and life. “I’ve been in New York so much more; I like being here, I like seeing the shows.”

Like Leonard, Mr. Goldblum has done some teaching. He founded the Fire Dept. theater company in California, and taught at the Playhouse West. He takes in a small number of students at UCLA and has taught at New York University and Carnegie Mellon. He himself studied under the famous Sanford Meisner after moving to New York at 17, and he sat in on classes taught by Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler at the famous Group Theatre.

“I had a lot of tough love teachers like Leonard,” he told us.

Mr. Goldblum is that rare character actor who always appears to be playing a version of himself. He has often been cast as scientists, teachers and various other attractive nerds. Every character he has played has been a bit Jeff Goldblumy (that’s a good thing), at least when he got through with them. They inherit part of his structural DNA, and he gets a piece of theirs, not unlike his botched experiment in The Fly. For example, most of his characters speak in exactly the same distinct way Mr. Goldblum does: fast, peppered with a lot of “ums” and “uhs,” occasionally picking a random word to elongate. (His syntax reminded us of Mr. Goldblum’s other great passion: jazz piano.)

That’s why Mr. Goldblum, like his Annie Hall co-star Christopher Walken, is such a perfect fit for the alternative comedy scene, which places a high premium on the meta-celebrity: someone who is in on a joke, in which the punch line is themselves. All through lunch, The Observer couldn’t shake the sense that we were talking to a Jeff Goldblum character.

Like a jazz musician, he free associates—smoothly riffing off of whatever ideas are thrown his way. Occasionally he’d just throw something out there and see how we reacted.

“So, you’re Jewish, how about that?” he asked, completely out of left field. Then we started talking about bat mitzvahs. Then hallucinogenic drugs. Then Pride and Prejudice.

Then Mr. Goldblum launched into Hebrew. “Baruch atah adonai, elohainu melech ha’olam …” We joined in with some faintly remembered blessing over the Torah: “Asher ba-char banu mikal ha-ah-mim v’natan la-nu et torah-tow.”

He clapped his hands, and encouraged us to continue to indulge our passion for singing (but we don’t sing …) and acting (but we don’t act …), and painting (we began to wonder if Mr. Goldblum realized he was being interviewed by someone who had already chosen a profession in writing).

He seemed to be loosening up. When we lobbed a soft-ball question—what motivates his character, Leonard?—he replied, “I’ve been immersed in this for a while, so I have thoughts aplenty, amassed up into this point in my current thinking, which may evolve over the next week.”

We believe that was all one sentence.

Even if he didn’t plan on a second coming as a pop culture figure in his late 50s, Mr. Goldblum certainly has the gig down. He’s irreverent. He’s unpredictable. He’s funny, and weird, and sexy.

After a decade of maintaining a low profile, he finally seems to have remembered his mantra.

Rickman, center.

I’ve never been a fan of Alan Rickman’s tight-lipped, prissy-mouthed acting style, but sometimes he picks a role that fits like a knee-high nylon sock, in a play that suits his nasal, slanty-eyed mannerisms with the sound of two hands clapping instead of one. The result in Theresa Rebeck’s Seminar, at the Golden, is a blessing. In fact, the entire cast of five is a marvel of well-oiled introspection, which is certainly a good thing, because without them, the enjoyable but often untidy and uneven play would be nothing more than a lot of clever one-liners.

Mr. Rickman plays Leonard, a sour, disillusioned, once-respected author who mysteriously gave up writing to take up copy editing at Random House. Impoverished and bitter, he now teaches writing workshops for pretentious young hopefuls with ambitions to write the great American novel. His current seminar is set in an $800-a-month rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side with nine rooms and a river view belonging to one of the four students in the class who have shelled out $5,000 apiece to impress each other by dispensing earth-shattering undergraduate proclamations such as “Kerouac is a misogynist hack” and “Post-modernism has really fallen on hard times.” The students are Kate (riveting Lily Rabe, who looks more like her mother, Jill Clayburgh, every time I see her), the wealthy, overeducated pseudointellectual Bennington graduate whose apartment serves as a makeshift classroom; Izzy (Hettienne Park), an Asian sexpot whose ambition is to write the kind of steamy stuff that will land her on the cover of New York magazine and bares her breasts to prove she’s ready for the task; Douglas (Jerry O’Connell), a preppie dude who learns to his horror that he’s cut out for nothing better than junky Hollywood screenplays; and Martin (Hamish Linklater), a skinny snob who annoys everyone by acting like a member of the semantics police (“Inigo! You said ‘Indigo Jones.’ It’s Inigo!”). Secretly, they all want to win the approval of their teacher, but what they get is humiliation, insults, discouragement and a torrent of colorful four-letter words that reduces them all to little more than literary larvae. Ms. Rebeck cusses more than David Mamet, but is more amusing than deadly.

Nothing they come up with discussing and dissecting each other’s work rouses the hooded eyelids of their pompous ass of a leader. He calls them whores, dismisses their stories as hollow and chides them for knowing nothing about what they are writing about—like, for instance, the world. He has traveled the globe rubbing elbows with HIV patients, Rwanda genocide survivors and “a Russian prostitute of indeterminate gender” who inspired him. Why can’t they experience life before they attempt to describe it in a “soul-sucking waste of words”? A story Kate has been working on for six years is trashed in one sentence for lack of relevance. (“I don’t have to go beyond the first five words, because I don’t give a shit!” he attacks.) While Leonard takes a two-week break from the 10-week seminar to inspect the damage in Somalia, the group begins to suspect maybe they’re being ripped off. Since no seminar I’ve ever attended in the craft of fiction writing (or anything else) has ever been taught by such a cruel, mean-spirited sadist, I began to suspect Ms. Rebeck’s plausibility quotient is lacking.

To ease her depression, Kate wolfs down bags of chips, liters of Coca-Cola, quarts of Ben & Jerry’s and bowls of raw cookie dough, necessitating a lot of food props. This trash food explosion is shared by Martin, who has now become her roommate. The group begins to plot a strategy to expose their teacher as a phony. When Leonard returns, Kate presents him with a memoir about a Cuban transvestite gang leader written by someone she met at Bennington. Leonard finally loves something so much that he wants to meet the author. The joke is that Kate wrote it herself to prove the teacher’s theories about “write what you know” ridiculous. But Douglas goes one better—accusing Leonard of plagiarism in his early work. Stripped of stature, dignity and even identity, Leonard becomes a marble parody of failure. Or is he? Does he end up a poseur or a creative inspiration? It isn’t until the play’s final scene (shockingly sentimental, considering the cynical nature of the material) that we discover what Leonard’s motives are, and how he plans to make his talent count. For a master craftsman in mannerisms bordering on madness, Mr. Rickman is captivating. You can almost see the spit harden in the corners of his pursed lips, while the blood coagulates in his narrowed eyes. This happens in all of his roles, and he usually plays them all the same way. This time he’s doubly malevolent, but curiously charming.

I’m not at all sure what Ms. Rebeck hopes we will take home with us from Seminar, but I am convinced the point of the play is that there is no point at all. It meekly points out the fact, underscored by abrasive, hostile monologues, that fiction is dead, Hollywood is the only way to make money as a writer, and accepting teaching jobs in the wilderness of dream shredding is the answer for desperate failures to pay off their credit cards. It takes one hour and thirty minutes for Leonard (and Mr. Rickman) to reveal their secret vulnerability, and for Ms. Rebeck to map out what happened to the four students in the seminar. I’m afraid I found that final scene in Leonard’s cluttered, book-strewn hovel, in which you find out how everyone turns out, disappointingly contrived and frankly unbelievable.

But don’t be deterred. Theresa Rebeck is sloppy at structure, but she creates interesting characters and writes dialogue that is pungent, contemporary and smart. Director Sam Gold moves everyone around in groups, like chess pieces, with a level of competence that is thrilling in its thoroughness, and it’s a tribute to perfect casting that the actors find the subtext to their characters that is not always evident in the writing. I said earlier that Seminar is uneven and I meant it. But all told, it’s not a bad evening, and sometimes it’s even a good deal better than that.

rreed@observer.com

Radcliffe.

This is it, kids. Absolutely, positively the end of the Harry Potter series. I feel good about that, knowing I will never have to sit through another installment. The franchise that started 10 years ago and seems more like 10 lifetimes ago has at last written an ultimate “The End.” I’ve outgrown Lilliputian witches and goblins with flying broomsticks, and so have they. With boobs, hairy armpits and other star-making accoutrements, the time has come for them to pursue headier goals, like Broadway musicals and Vogue covers.

But before we wave adieu, let it be said that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, the eighth and final installment, goes out with Fourth of July fireworks. For dedicated children who are aging along with the spellbinding midget warlocks they adore, a new Harry Potter movie is always a call to arms. They won’t be disappointed in this one. The three heroes are as panting and breathless as Liza Minnelli, and even to an aging Muggle like me, the movie makes sense for a change. As boring and deadly as the last one was, it’s now obvious why director David Yates and ace screenwriter Steve Kloves (let’s pray that with Harry out of his system, this fine craftsman will get back to serious business of writing superior scripts, like his Wonder Boys, Flesh and Bone and The Fabulous Baker Boys) put us all to sleep with the plodding narrative details in Part 1. They were saving the best for last.

You still need a deep foundation in J.K. Rowling’s fertile Potter history to make sense of the mystery Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) must at last solve in th e spectacular battle to save Hogwarts, continue fighting against evil, discover the missing horcrux and save the world from Lord Voldemort. The book devoted hundreds of pages to the final resolution, which is why it had to be divided into two films instead of one. (They also needed extra time and double the budget to perfect the myriad digitally mastered 3-D special effects that magically unfold before your eyes in Part 2 like an exploding theme park.) Mercifully, the film wastes no time cutting straight to the chase as the kids gather in an underground hideout to plan their strategy to seek and destroy the remaining horcruxes, which are the wands made of unicorn hairs and the heartstring of a dragon that make Lord Voldemort invincible. The goblin Griphook leads them to the first one, hidden deep inside a bank vault, where the first effective use of 3-D hits you right between the eyes on an underground railway that looks like a ride on the Cyclone at Coney Island. Escaping over the rooftops on the back of a flying, fire-breathing monster, Harry has two of the wands that make up the Deathly Hallows. In order to save his life and destroy the forces of darkness, he must locate the third, called the “elder wand,” which Voldemart needs to rule the world. The search takes you on an adventure full of unprecedented thrills that will take your breath away.

Everyone returns, including the brother and dead sister of the beloved Professor Dumbledore, who live in an oil painting, and even the ghost of Dumbledore himself, played once again by Michael Gambon. Hogwarts is now in the malevolent hands of the sinister Severus Snape (hissing, sniveling Alan Rickman), who is holding students and staff hostage as they wait for Harry to rescue them. The walls and platforms that hold up Hogwarts crumble and collapse like Tinker Toys in a masterpiece of destruction, turning the school of magic into the world’s most colossal rubbish heap. A humongous man-eating snake with fangs that strike the audience in 3-D almost devours Hermione, while Ron narrowly escapes a cauldron of flames on a broomstick. With Hogwarts gone and almost every member of the cast killed off by Voldemort, there could obviously never be another installment. But there’s still time for tender-hearted Professor Minerva McGonagell (Maggie Smith) to save the day with a spell she’s been waiting for years to try. There is even a flashback that explains the sinister role Snape played in Harry’s life story that I found unexpectedly touching. The only thing left to do to bring this saga to a heart-stopping conclusion is for Harry to enter the forbidden forest of death like a true hero and face his destiny with Voldemort, played one last time by the hatchet-faced Ralph Fiennes, who actually shows his human side for the first time. Frankly, I’m sorry to see him go.

None of it makes one lick of sense and a lot of the dialogue is pure jabberwocky, decipherable only by those who know the books by heart. This includes billions of rabid fans, so I don’t think anyone is even slightly worried that a little formality like incoherence will affect the box office. The movie never wore out my patience like Part 1 did, because the awesome effects take over where the plot used to be, and although this is the end, my guess is that it will fire the imagination for years to come. What fun to feel like a kid again. I had a marvelous time.

rreed@observer.com

HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART 2

Running time 130 minutes

Written by Steve Kloves

Directed by David Yates

Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman

3/4

Am I the only person over 12 who truly believes the Harry Potter franchise has outlived its shelf life? Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth and worst installment yet, is two and a half hours of paralyzing tedium, featuring another colossal waste of British talent and a plot a real witch couldn’t find with a crystal ball. The kids at Hogwarts no longer have any relevance. They have never heard of iPods, cell phones or the Internet. Yet they keep on coming, like deer ticks.

Don’t ask me what this thing is about. The 10-year-old in the next seat at the press screening told me it was her favorite of all the J. K. Rowling books, but at the end she did not applaud. In fact, this is the first Harry Potter movie I’ve ever seen that faded to black in deafening silence. The über-demon Lord Voldemort, vanquished countless times by the moppet warlocks at Hogwarts, returns from the grave in swirls of tornadolike smoke spiraling from the sky to destroy Millennium Bridge, and nothing is safe until Harry can master the clues to unraveling the secrets in the potions book that once belonged to the nonsensical “Half-Blood Prince.” Harry’s ally against the Death Eaters is Hogwarts potions professor Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent); his adversaries include the malevolent professor Severus Snape, played by snarling, prissy-mouthed Alan Rickman, and nasty Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) and his gothic nightmare aunt Bellatrix Lestrange (Helena Bonham Carter). Challenged and thwarted at every turn, the other “regulars,” like Harry’s pals Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint)—so cute at 11 when the series began—are now 19 and horny as gerbils. With such a bramble of romantic entanglements, they scarcely have time to notice the dragon blood dripping from the ceiling when they’re so busy making out behind the wolfsbane. The flying broomstick competitions (been there, done that) are like outtakes. Whatever suspense there is surrounds the true identity of the “Half-Blood Prince,” and if you don’t guess who that is from his first snarl, you just haven’t been paying attention. (There’s also a dull subplot, about Ron’s near-death experience with a particularly potent love potion, that could easily been cut.) Julie Walters has one line. Maggie Smith does an occasional walk-on to bark, “Go to your houses—no dawdling!” There’s not nearly enough action and entirely too much metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. The deaths of beloved characters are likely to leave the little ones bawling. Even the visual effects are tired. The underground grotto where Harry and Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) take on the zombies of the undead looks like a clip from one of the previous five films. Some fine directors enhanced the earlier Potter epics; David Yates is not one of them. I pray Steve Kloves, the gifted filmmaker who scripted the first four films and now returns for the boring sixth, soon throws in the towel and gets back to his real talent for writing and/or directing original films of his own, like the memorable The Fabulous Baker Boys and Flesh and Bone.

As for Daniel Radcliffe, who has outgrown the role of Harry Potter, it’s not easy to accept him after his full-frontal nude turn on Broadway in Equus. Gee, Harry, we hardly recognized ye with thee clothes on.

rreed@observer.com

Two things I can count on every August: Movies get lousier than they were all year, and I go on vacation. This time, it’s different. I’m still taking a month off, but there are some big surprises at the movies. Most of them are unexpected and underpublicized, some of them boast low budgets and high rewards, a few of them need to be added to your must-see list, and you can start with Bottle Shock, a marvelous, beautifully made, feel-good movie that is guaranteed to revive everyone’s flagging faith in American pride at home and abroad—something in these sorry, perilous times we’re desperately short of.

Talk about novel and unhackneyed themes. Bottle Shock is not a documentary, but it does provide a true account of the actual events in 1976, the year of America’s bicentennial, when a small California vineyard produced a perfect chardonnay that won the international “Judgment of Paris” competitions, changed the course of history and put American wines on the map forever. “Bottle shock” is the term used when a new white wine—properly aged, tested and ready to market for the first time—turns brown inside its bottle before it is uncorked. This used to be a disgrace, a tragedy, and a cause for bankruptcy. But all is not lost. Veteran vintners have learned through experience that if you leave it alone to sit, brown wine sometimes returns to its natural color and flavor in a few days. This is what happened in 1976. In the Napa Valley, a lawyer named Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman) hocked everything to buy a Calistoga vineyard and follow his dream to develop the world’s greatest California chardonnay, named after his Chateau Montelena vineyard. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), a snobbish British wine merchant (and secret admirer of California wines) living in Paris, drummed up a gimmick to save his struggling wine shop: stage a contest, judged by nine carefully chosen French oenophiles, pitting French wines against their Californian counterparts. Bottle Shock re-stages the swirling, sniffing, sipping and spitting of the actual competition, but more interestingly, it catalogs the internecine conflicts that almost prevented the winning chardonnay from crossing the ocean at all.

Up to his ears in mortgages and bank loans, Barrett worked day and night to make better wine while Spurrier dodged the barbs of French food critics, sommeliers and his own customers. Two men with nothing in common but their passion for the grape. In Napa, Barrett also had to battle the priorities of his slacker son Bo (Chris Pine); his most loyal worker and Bo’s best friend, Gustavo (Freddy Rodriguez, from Six Feet Under), the Mexican kid who knew so much about wine he could tell the contents and vintage of a bottle just by tasting it; and his pretty new intern Sam (Rachael Taylor), whose affections were divided between both boys, causing friction throughout the vineyard. When Spurrier arrived in Napa, all kinds of hell broke loose. Then the finished product, though exceptional in taste, oxidized and turned brown, and the devastated elder Barrett ordered 500 cases to be destroyed. How the entire vintage of discolored wine was intercepted on its way to the dump, how Bo convinced a planeful of tourists to each carry one bottle of Chateau Montelena to Paris in their carry-on luggage (ah, those were the days!), and how the vineyard was saved from its creditors and Barrett was elevated to the status of global royalty are fertile elements in a story that leaves you cheering.

It’s a great story, and Bottle Shock polishes it off like a rare Mouton Rothschild. From the spectacular backdrops of Napa wine country to the uniformly spot-on performances by his entire cast, director Randall Miller has left no bridge uncrossed in the unfolding saga. Except for a few dramatic liberties (the gorgeous intern Sam, who adds romantic oomph, is fictional), the characters in the story are real, still alive, and acted as invaluable contributors to the meticulous research. Jim Barrett is in his 80s now; his son Bo is in his 50s; and their Chardonnay is still coveted by wine lovers, though it’s in short supply. Their obsession with the art of winemaking is thrillingly captured in a script (by Jody Savin, director Miller, and Ross Schwartz) that makes you feel the soil, smell the vines, taste the body and flavor of the finished product, and appreciate what Galileo meant when he said, “Wine is sunlight held together by water.” Bottle Shock goes a long way toward turning 2008 into a vintage year.

rreed@observer.com

It’s been almost six years since Johnny Depp’s last London slasher flick, From Hell, so it’s understandable that his latest project, Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, left the bohemian-chic thespian a little harried by the whole experience. In Mr. Depp’s first reunion with longtime collaborator Tim Burton since 2005’s Corpse Bride, the 44-year-old actor will co-star alongside Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen. Very nice!

“Having worked with sharp objects before [in Edward Scissorhands], everything was fine until I had to shave someone,” Mr. Depp told Scotland's Daily Record. “The shaving cream made me really nervous. It was the most uncomfortable moment of my life [shaving Mr. Rickman]. Poor Alan. I've never really experienced that full on thing. This is a full beard for me - this is a lumberjack thing for me. But I can definitely appreciate it because when you get into the chair with a stranger and they lather your face up with sharp instruments around your throat...it's frightening."

And while Mr. Depp is no stranger to a little music making—he has worked with Oasis and Tom Petty in the past—he said he was spooked to the max by the prospect of crooning for the camera. “I think I was probably more frightened than anyone. I've never tried karaoke. It scares the hell out of me. I've never been that drunk—and I've been drunk,” he told the paper at a recent press junket. "Tim said he didn't know if I could sing and, likewise, I didn't know if I could sing. I did these demos in my friend's garage studio because I didn't know if I'd be able to hit a note, to be honest, I really didn't. I did that and sent it to Tim and he said we're going to be okay. And then I became a bit more confident," added the seemingly unflappable star.

All funny on-set anecdotes aside, Mr. Depp still knows the importance of actually publicizing his projects at press junkets. Whetting the appetites of critics and fans starving for a little more Johnny, he settled in and got right down to business, saying, “Someone is probably weeping after watching my performance."

To see pictures of the actor from the Sweeny Todd press junket, click here.

There are two stories to tell here. One is about Rachel Corrie, who was crushed to death, age 23, by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza as she was trying to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home. She was a pro-Palestinian activist who believed quixotically in nonviolence.

The other story is about a 90-minute one-woman play created from Rachel Corrie’s letters, journals and e-mails, and edited by its director, the well-known actor Alan Rickman, and a leading British journalist, Katharine Viner. The play premiered in April 2005 at the Royal Court Theatre in London—without protest or incident—and went on to be staged successfully in the West End.

It was due to arrive in March, at the nonprofit New York Theatre Workshop—but the production was “postponed.” This usually excellent theater company, mirroring the world, had lost its reason, too: It caved in cravenly to unspecified outside pressure. (There are pro-Israelis who vilify Rachel Corrie and oppose the very idea that her story should be told.) Since then, the Theatre Workshop has changed its story so many times that it ought to rename itself “Dissemble, Spin and Run.”

I wrote back in February that we look to our theater to be our independent forum, our pulpit, our truth-teller and witness. Plays written in blood like My Name Is Rachel Corrie are not meant to be “acceptable” or reach “consensus.” That is for weaselly politicians. Nor should our theaters be “balanced” like a boring op-ed page. For heaven’s sake, I pleaded, give us plays of passion and consequence—not caution, compliance and fear.

After the Theatre Workshop debacle, not a single major nonprofit theater in the city offered to stage My Name Is Rachel Corrie. The production at the Minetta Lane Theatre downtown is backed by James Hammerstein Productions, a commercial outfit. When the compromised commercial theater is prepared to take bigger risks than our nonprofits, we’ve got trouble.

After all the uproar and bitter controversy that preceded its arrival here, My Name Is Rachel Corrie turns out to be a poignant, modest and humane play about a young American idealist who was trying desperately to make a difference. It’s about an unstoppable young woman’s search for “bigness”—implying a desire and concern that transcends the unbearable lightness of being. She rejects the small, safe, domesticated life for a life that’s held in fragile balance.

The most unexpected and rewarding discovery of the play is that Corrie, a political idealist since she was in fifth grade in Olympia, Wash., was a fine poet in the making.

“It was the same day I decided to be an artist and a writer and I didn’t give a shit if I was mediocre,” she declares melodramatically of a turning point, “and I didn’t give a shit if my whole damn high school turned and pointed and laughed in my face …. I was finally awake, forever and ever.”

She can be sardonic: “‘Fun life,’ I say. ‘Fun life.’ I imagine I live in a Mountain Dew commercial.” She’s precociously earnest: “I guess I’ve grown up a little,” she wrote, age 12. “It’s all relative anyway.” Mercifully, she becomes a normal, sexually hung-up teenager who’s mad about the music of Pat Benatar and does her best not to fall in love “with someone who is perpetually leaving you.” She will grow prosaic and alarming in an alien world. “Sleep in tent. Gunshot through tent. Start smoking.” But it’s the natural poetry within her fated life that grabs us most.

“Had a dream about falling,” goes her terrible premonition, “falling to my death off something dusty and smooth and crumbling like the cliffs in Utah. But I kept holding on, and when each new foothold or handle of rock broke, I reached out as I fell and grabbed a new one. I didn’t have time to think about anything—just react as if I was playing an adrenaline-filled video game. And I heard, ‘I can’t die, I can’t die,’ again and again in my head.”

Megan Dodds, the American actress, plays Rachel Corrie (Ms. Dodds originated the role in London), and her committed performance takes sustained flight when Corrie arrives in Jerusalem and the hell of Gaza. Mr. Rickman has encouraged her to play the early domestic scenes a shade too giddily young in her bobbing ponytail. (I was uncertain what age she was meant to be.) The deliberate, near-mundane image of Corrie’s boinky ordinariness humanizes her, bringing her down to earth from the shaky plateau of martyred saint or demonized symbol of war. But was she ever cute? My hunch is that she was always closer to her own unflinching, unsentimental description of herself as “scattered and deviant and too loud.”

During the central scenes in Gaza, Ms. Dodds gains stature and depth, taking us closer into the heart of darkness. The spare, evocative set by Hildegard Bechtler suggesting a bullet-riddled wasteland with plastic chairs and a TV set is exactly right. Corrie looks in astonishment and outrage at “the constant presence of death” all around her. She rescues a dead man on a stretcher as warning shots are fired in front of her from the Israeli army. She pleads in despairing letters to her concerned, fair-minded mother for the justice of the Palestinian cause.

“A lot of the time the kindness of the people here, coupled with the willful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I can’t believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry. It hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be.”

As Corrie’s involvement in the Palestinian cause grew, she hoped her “international white person privilege” might somehow protect her. The achievement of the play is to present its young heroine as a vulnerable, flawed, idealistic human being. The tragedy that affects us so much is her growing disillusion in the chaos and the absolute inevitability of her death.

Toward her self-prophesied end, Rachel Corrie the born idealist was losing faith. The baseness of the impoverished, violent life she witnessed proved too much for her to bear.

“Anyway I’m rambling,” she writes home, exhausted. “Just want to tell my mom that I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature.”

Then she pleads helplessly, “This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop …. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me. This is not what I meant when I looked at Capitol Lake and said, ‘This is the wide world and I’m coming to it.’”

On the Web, someone has written about Rachel Corrie: “Can they dig her up and kill her again please?” To others, she is a hero. It’s enough for us that My Name Is Rachel Corrie is the saddening story of a young woman who was killed trying to stop an unending war in the wide, abysmal world.

Apart from the previous star vehicles and hack productions, the problem with staging Noël Coward is Noël Coward. The famously clipped, stiff-upper-lip style of "The Master," along with his staccato delivery and silk-dressing-gown chic, has made him the most badly impersonated public figure on and off the English stage. There's even a scratchy recording of him with Gertrude Lawrence-they were the stars of the original Privates Lives production-doing their racy, bantering stuff .

The achievement of the new production's British stars, Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan, is that they've jettisoned the dated legacy and the impersonations and actually made those forever battling lovers, Elyot and Amanda, intelligently real. They're both giving supreme comic performances-the best I've seen in Private Lives , or most other places recently.

Be warned, though: This is not the erotic experience the Times critic would have you believe. "The erotic bloom is restored to one of the funniest comedies of the twentieth century," The Times announced, having pointed out that the subject of Private Lives is really sex.

You'll appreciate how tactful I'm trying to be. I'm not even mentioning Ben Brantley by name. But if you visit Private Lives for eroticism, you're going to end up in the wrong place. Noël Coward is about as erotic as Fred Astaire. Stylishness is another matter. The theme of Private Lives isn't anything so disgusting as sex. Love, the impossibility of love, the frightful, fatiguing, infatuated strain of love, the hey-ho, if love were all of love, is Coward's gold-embossed calling card. What's that "nasty, insistent little tune" that Elyot complains about to Amanda and will later sing with her? It's Coward's own bitter-sweet "Some Day I'll Find You," of course.

Some day I'll find you

Moonlight behind you

True to the dream I am dreaming

As I draw near you

You'll smile a little smile;

For a little while

We shall stand

Hand in hand.

Slim erotic pickings there .... The sentimental theme song of Private Lives represents Elyot and Amanda's sweet romantic yearning. The reality of the eternally warring lovers is that they're doomed to be incapable of living without each other. ("I'll leave you never / Love you forever," the lyric goes on.) But what do they really want? They want what Noël Coward wanted, in his own inscrutable fashion.

Coward's 1930's keynote address in the play is Elyot's own unapologetic credo: "Let's be superficial and blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can .... " His message is a defense of deft flippancy in the teeth of disapproving bourgeois morality. It's the same escapist message conveyed by the bohemian modernists and closet gays of Coward's Design for Living . "Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths," Elyot adds for good measure. "Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light."

Coward's self-defined talent to amuse could make anything even remotely serious seem boring. He loads the dice against the opposition from the start (and gets away with it). The opening balcony scene of Private Lives is the best balcony scene since Romeo and Juliet , only wittier. Elyot and Amanda, divorced for five years, meet on adjoining balconies of their Deauville hotel where they're honeymooning with their new spouses, tweedy Victor and Sibyl (as in "Don't quibble, Sibyl"). Victor and Sibyl are conventional middle-class clods-no match for a good dose of smart triviality.

Why the effortlessly bored Elyot married bossy Sibyl (played by Emma Fielding in supercomic form), or why the free-spirited Amanda married humorless Victor (the first-rate Adam Godley), is a death wish in search of normality. By Act II, Elyot and Amanda have jilted their spouses and fled to Paris. I've always reluctantly found the second half of Private Lives a bit of a self-pleading romp after the dazzling perfection of the first. Everyone knows at least a line or two from Act I. "Very big, China." "And Japan?" "Very small." But how many of us can recite anything from Act II-except, perhaps, for Elyot's "Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs."

Howard Davies' otherwise winning production falters by slowing up the second half. Coward's wit is lean and must crackle along. Best not to linger over its artifice. But the director has over-choreographed the knockabout comedy of the closing fight scene, and he's managed to turn "Someday I'll Find You" into a duet and near dirge. He's after the sacred subtext.

Oh, that old thing. The subtext! The brittle, polished surfaces of Coward, like Wilde's elegant wit, is used to camouflage authentic emotion. As a gay man, Noël Coward had good reason to be circumspect in an age when homosexuality was still a crime. Coded evasion was a tactful, necessary style. But reticence has always been a deeply ingrained English characteristic. The national temperament is one of restraint. We often must deduce what the traditionally reserved Englishman feels by what he leaves unsaid. There are private lives (and public faces). Appearances are to be maintained.

But is there any mystery left by now in Coward's subtext? Hasn't it already been strip-mined for what isn't there? For myself, Private Lives ' appeal is its flippancy. Rumors that there's much underneath the underneath have been greatly exaggerated. To be sure, Coward is masking solitude and need, but it's a transparent mask. What do we most remember after seeing Private Lives if not the fun we had?

I've written before about being lucky enough to have met Noël Coward when I was just starting out and he was, as it were, finishing up. At 70, Coward was approaching the end of his life. I visited him at his home in Switzerland and interviewed him over two mornings and lunch. "Do stop racking your brains, dear boy, and eat up your lunch," he advised me, looking amused. This is the thing: Apart from the fact that he really was Noël Coward down to his silk dressing gown, apart from him being gloriously funny (and happily enjoying his own jokes), he deflected all seriousness like an unwelcome intruder.

He was like his plays. When I mentioned Samuel Beckett's pessimism to him, he replied with unblinking cool, "He must have read too many of his own plays. It gets him down, I expect." I asked him what the year 1930 meant to him. " Private Lives , of course." And 1939? " Present Laughter ," he replied, somewhat overlooking the significance of World War II.

Well, the Master wasn't about to tell his innermost secrets to me. I asked in all innocence how much of his work didn't we know about. He paused for the only time during our meeting: "My dear boy .... " But then, Coward revealed little about himself to anyone.

Is it possible that beneath his glittering, urbane exterior there was a glittering, urbane interior? Naturally, it's said that Mr. Rickman and Ms. Duncan have gone for the "unexplored" subtext of Private Lives . From my point of view, these leading actors-who play so beautifully together-have made Coward's vintage comedy grow up. Mr. Rickman, with his wary, hooded eyes, conveys Elyot's droll boredom in a masterly way; it's as if he's on the verge of killing anything mundane, including poor Sibyl. He's correctly restrained with what Elyot calls "the big, romantic stuff," and is pleasingly, slyly arrogant whenever possible. He leaves us in no doubt that Elyot is smarter than anyone for miles. As Coward's alter ego, it's the least Elyot can do.

Ms. Duncan's Amanda is another of her fine performances, suggesting a brassier sense of comedy than you might expect. Gertrude Lawrence, the original Amanda, was adored by Coward for her vulgarity. (Known as "Gert," no Gert was ever pert.) Ms. Duncan's faintly South London accent hovers on being common in exactly the right low-comedy way. She glides over Coward's archness. "You mustn't be serious, my dear one, it's just what they want," goes Elyot's advice on the code of appearances. The beautiful Ms. Duncan suggests danger and feckless need at a glance. Her Amanda is trouble, all right, and a joy.