British miniseries knows what you want to see.

– In her continuing efforts to upstage that total biatch Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes decided to strip down in a tanning salon lobby in New York and run around screaming "I'm a retired multi-millionaire!!" Said an eyewitness, "There was definitely something wrong with her." What do you think it was?

– Gwyneth Paltrow is totally over her Brooklyn love. Now she's on to only talking about really important stuff in GOOP ... like wrapping paper that costs $52.

– James Franco wants to fine people who don't vote. Possibly to raise money for his next performance art project.

– Jerry Seinfeld alone could probably finance the reconstruction of NYC with his Seinfeld residuals.

– You know, we had heard rumblings on IMDB about a Jon Hamm/Daniel Radcliffe Sky Arts 1 HD series, A Young Doctor's Notebook, in which they play the older and younger versions, respectively, of a Russian Ph.D. But this is the first time we've seen pictures of them in a bathtub together, which is a very Terrence Malick way to shoot your bloody show.

So, which party had the best-dressed attendees?

Daniel Radcliffe, picking up chicks (Getty Images)

Oh my Dumbledorfs: Daniel Radcliffe (or as we like to refer to him, the British Elijah Wood), has come out and admitted that he copulated with fans of his Harry Potter films during a recent interview with The Daily Mirror. No, he didn't have sex during the interview...you know what we mean.

So while we're all still reeling from the shock that the boy wizard drinks too much alcohol (and is not that funny at live comedy), now we have to come terms that some lucky Muggle got Harry's wand in their ____ (whatever the magical apparatus equivalent of a vagina is).

From Mr. Radcliffe's admission:

'I was always very nervous about the groupie thing. I like to like somebody before I sleep with them.

'You know, you’re going to have to talk to them afterwards, even if it is a one-night stand.

'I have... I mean, that has happened, but generally speaking I’ve known the person. Apart from a few times when I was drinking.'

Radcliffe sans lightening bolt scar, recently introduced to hair product.

Harry Potter is six feet under and Daniel Radcliffe is understandably looking for ways to move his career in new directions. Full frontal nudity all over the Internet and singing and dancing his way through a recent Broadway revival of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying broadened his fan base beyond the teenybopper rut. Now he’s trying something else: a creepy haunted-house thriller crawling with ghosts from the spirit world called The Woman in Black. It’s not exactly a setback, but it won’t break new ground, either. I’ve had bigger scares from a fish tank. Boring and sedentary, not to mention only occasionally coherent, this creaking-door mystery is not much of a vehicle to display young Mr. Radcliffe’s range and charm. He plays a prim, troubled lawyer named Arthur Kipps, mourning the death of a wife and faced with the responsibility of raising a young son alone, who has neglected his duties at the bar until he is dispatched by his firm to a remote moor on the windswept coast of Northern England to save his reputation (and his job) by sorting through the disorganized papers of an elderly deceased client in a bleak mansion plagued by spirits. From the minute he arrives with pocket watch on a chain and in a long black waistcoat, hostility glowers from every shadow. The villagers peer at him from locked windows. No lorry driver wants to take him to his destination, the gloomy inn has no reservation for him, and he is reluctantly relegated to a cold attic room where, in a flashback, we see three little girls fall into a trance and rise from their tea party to leap through the windows to their deaths below. It takes quite a time before the pieces of a poisonous puzzle appear, and when they do, they don’t always fall into place with clarity. But the stock effects of wind, rain, mist, a cemetery in the fog and an ominous raven (think of The Secret Garden) add austerity, if not much adventure. Where is Heathcliff when we need him?

Instead of Brontë logic, we get a vaporous apparition in black who has been haunting the doleful little hamlet for years, killing off the children. Among the clutter of souvenirs and personal effects left behind by the owner of the old manor, Mr. Kipps finds the death certificate of a 7-year-old boy, drowned in the marshes, his body never recovered. Further investigation reveals that the boy was not the son of the mistress of the house who falsely pretended to be his mother, but that of her crazed sister, who was found hanging from the beams and now seems to be living up to her vow to haunt the woman she blamed for her child’s death from beyond the grave. This is the spook of the film’s title whose twisted apparition turns up at the windows and wafts through the corridors in the dark, pointing to ominous warnings drawn in blood under the moldy Victorian wallpaper. The crumbling estate is being haunted by both the tortured suicide victim and her son, and it is Mr. Kipps’s unsolicited opinion that the only way to put the spirits to rest is the dig up both their bodies and bury mother and child together in the same coffin, where they can be together in eternal peace. To this end, James Watkins’s direction takes its wearying time, but his dependence on eerie psychological effects (keep an eye on those ancient toys, like the contents of a sinister doll house) instead of blood and gore is gratifying. Fresh from her showy triumph in Albert Nobbs, Janet McTeer chews the scenery as a mentally unstable neighbor whose own child was murdered by the malevolent woman in black. Mr. Radcliffe does his best to divest himself of any trace of Harry Potter, but he’s too short to give the role of the solicitor much weight. The totally predictable and utterly preposterous final scene, in which the woman in black returns one more time to wreak havoc for no reason, leaves the viewer feeling cheated and angry. For the ghost of Harry Potter in particular and occult fright flicks in general, The Woman in Black is close, but no cigar.

rreed@observer.com

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

Running Time 95 minutes

Written by Susan Hill (novel) and Jane Goldman (screenplay)

Directed by James Watkins

Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Janet McTeer and Ciarán Hinds

2/4

'Bullett' cover, shot by Mariano Vivanco.

In the next issue of Bullett, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe opens up about performing nude in Equus ("some nights there would be some beautiful girl in the front row and I’d be like, Oh fuck, in two hours you’re going to have seen everything") and whether he wants kids (yes!). In a portion cut from the article, Mr. Radcliffe describes his regrets over his small stature:

"If I didn’t have this build, and if just I’d been a bit taller, I would have played sports. I could have been a boxer at this height, but it’s too late now. If somebody had put me in a gym when I was 9 years old, I think I would have loved it. I definitely want my kids to do something like that."

Surely, given that his petiteness landed him a multi-multi-million-dollar role at age 12, he can't regret it too deeply.

Daniel Radcliffe vs James Franco in a Ginsberg-off? Its possible. (Via Harry Potter and Howl)

James Franco (and David Cross, John Turturro, et al) have reason to be worried: Harry Potter is about to smash your portrayal of New York beat poet Allen Ginsberg into dust. Daniel Radcliffe, fresh from filming the Victorian horror flick The Woman In Black has reportedly joined the cast of Kill Your Darlings (not to be confused with the 2006 flick with the same name) as the famous (and infamous) part of Jack Kerouac/Ginsberg/Lucien Carr trio.
Also up for the role was Jesse Eisenberg, and Chris Evans as Jack Kerouac has apparently fallen through. Kill is slated for 2012 and will be directed by relative newcomer John Krokidas. So how will Mr. Radcliffe stack up to various other actors who have played the enigmatic man who helped define a generation of confused sexual young men? Let's take a look:
James Franco in Howl:

John Turturro in Source:

David Cross, I'm Not There:

Ron Livingston, Beat:

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

Mr. Radcliffe, reformed boozehound.

The area around super-classy apartment building One Morton Square, in the edge of West Village, has a fine array of well-stoked boîtes from which boozy revelers can choose from. Hell, the Olsen twins used to live there! But it wasn't the best day for another of the spot's celeb denizens -- in the new issue of British GQ,  Daniel Radcliffe admitted that until August 2010, he hit the sauce a little bit too hard.

"I became so reliant on [alcohol] to enjoy stuff," Mr. Radcliffe said. ""I'm actually enjoying the fact that I can have a relationship with my girlfriend where I'm really pleasant and not fucked up totally all the time."

That's fine and all, but when you were "fucked up totally all the time," what were your favorite spots? The Observer called every place with a liquor license in the area in search of the spots he found the most spiritual.

First up, Barrow Pub. Pubs -- they're British! Surely, Harry Potter came by The Barrow to knock back something stronger than butterbeer, no?

"I didn't even know he lived here," the bartender told The Observer over the phone.

Criminy! What about the sleek lounge Lelabar? Surely this bougie wine bar lured the underage addict with dreams of drams of Pinot Noir.

"Haven't seen him," the bartender said. "I usually hear about all the sightings, and I live around here and I haven’t seen him."

Then we realized, Radcliffe, he's a rebel. He'd want to go to a real Rock 'n' Roll spot. Hello, Rockbar NYC.

"Haven’t seen him in here, but then again we get some people," said the barkeep. "Katy Perry was here over pride weekend."

Modesty, Rockbar NYC. Learn it.

OK, so clearly Mr. Radcliffe is into some solitary drinking in his Morton Street flat. He did, after all, pay $4.9 million for the place -- why leave it? And with its adjacent location, King Deli is the place where he'd stock up on sixers.

"What?" the King Deli staff said to The Observer. "Who is this? I don't know."

Not a beer guy! And of course he's not--it must be  straight to the hard stuff for Daniel Radcliffe.

"Yeah, I don't think so," said the operator of Golden Rule Liquor, on Hudson Street. "I know the Harry Potter guy, though.  A couple times I've gone into a restaurant and he’s there."

A lead-- the guy actually does leave his apartment!

Then we rang Sea Grape Wine Shop, which stands a few blocks from his abode. Bingo.

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's been around," the cashier told us. "He's been here."

We pried for details about preference and frequency--a bottle of Merlot a week? Cognac every every Friday? daily afternoon pick up, case of Dom Perignon at the ready?--but he couldn't say for certain. We now know that, until his August 2010 decision to get sober, the lush that was Daniel Radcliffe got his stuff at Sea Grape.

New York: "A grim referendum on the last Harry Potter movie." Third sentence.

Los Angeles Times: "Harry Potter won't be taking home a Tony Award this year." First sentence ("Daniel Radcliffe" also third and fourth words in headline, after "Tony Awards").

The Atlantic: "But this year is a different story, marked chiefly by the snub in Best Actor in a Musical favorite Daniel Radcliffe, whose performance in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was considered a frontrunner to win." Third sentence.

Village Voice: "But though they did include names like Al Pacino, Frances McDormand, and Edie Falco, they left out Daniel Radcliffe, whom a lot of folks assumed to be the front runner to win Best Actor in a Musical!" Fifth sentence (and fifth paragraph, in its entirety), though the article is illustrated with a photo of Mr. Radcliffe and its headline mentions his name before the Tonys'.

New York Times: "Somewhere, Lord Voldemort is surely smiling while "Harry Potter" fans are heartbroken: Daniel Radcliffe leveraged his years as the star of that boy-wizard franchise to play J. Pierrepont Finch in the current Broadway revival of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," and spent months in vocal and dance training to get up to speed for the role." First sentence, and illustration. (To be fair, this was but one story of several on the nominations--one focused specifically on snubs!)

Playbill: "Among the performers and productions that theatregoers may be surprised to see missing from the nominations are How to Succeed (and "Harry Potter") star Daniel Radcliffe, who made his Broadway musical debut as the nimble lead..." Beginning of fifteenth paragraph. God bless the trade publications!

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Indeed, the infamously irreverent Trey Parker and Matt Stone--whose long-running hit animated series has skewered nearly everyone, from Hillary Clinton to TV censors, Scientologists to Canadians--offer foul language, obscene jokes and plenty to offend, especially should you be a Latter-Day Saint. But their fantastic show (the two are credited for book, music and lyrics along with the similarly triple-threat Robert Lopez, a co-creator and songwriter of the dirty-puppet musical Avenue Q) isn't just fun, funny and immensely enjoyable; it's also surprisingly--and here's the dirty word--wholesome.

Sure, The Book of Mormon, which opened last week at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, features as its villain a tribal warlord named General Butt-Fucking Naked; yes, it mocks Mormon scripture; true, it offers a recurring joke about forcible intercourse with infants. It sends up star-studded benefit concerts, American patronizing of other cultures and, of course, Broadway. It offers Hitler, Genghis Khan, Jeffrey Dahmer and Johnny Cochran in a vaudeville song and dance.

But it's also an old-fashioned, toe-tapping, optimistic Big Broadway Musical, a buddy story about a mismatched pair of young Mormon missionaries sent to Uganda to convert the benighted natives. It argues for the social value of religion--no matter how implausible and arguably invented the stories upon which a religion is based--while teaching (if winkingly) the old showbiz lesson that the golden boy can be flawed and the young misfit, if only he believes in himself, can come back a star.

And it's not just that there's a surprisingly traditional message under The Book of Mormon's veneer of poop jokes and blasphemy (and I mean none of that as a criticism, neither the traditionality nor the blasphemy); the whole enterprise is also a comfortably traditional show, in the best sense.

Under the pitch-perfect direction of Casey Nicholaw and Mr. Parker are big production numbers, detailed and funny sets (by Scott Pask) and elaborate choreography (by Mr. Nicholaw), and Messrs. Parker, Lopez and Stone's tuneful score is memorable and hummable, show music that tells stories, deepens characters and gets laughs.

There's also a stellar cast, led by two ideal stars. Andrew Rannells is just right for Elder Price, the overachiever convinced he's destined for greatness: He's a central-casting leading man, strong of jaw, strong of voice and blond of hair, and he makes a fine leading Mormon, aware of Price's ridiculousness even as he plays up his arrogance. Josh Gad excels even more remarkably as Elder Cunningham, Price's disheveled loser of a counterpart: That the actor can seem so manifestly uncomfortable in his own skin, which made him an awkward fit as a Daily Show correspondent, works perfectly when he's playing a self-pitying failure, and who knew he could sing and dance?

So this is the lesson of The Book of Mormon, which will--and should--be a big, big hit: The elusive trick to succeeding on Broadway today is to write a smart, funny, sweet show, insert tuneful songs and a talented cast and give it a great staging. Subversive, ain't it?

It's also possible to achieve success without a lot of effort, as everyone knows--they've been singing about it on Broadway stages since How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert, debuted in 1961. Now the converse has also been proven true: It is entirely possible, as the How to Succeed revival that opened Sunday shows us, to fail in show business even while trying really, really hard.

And, boy, does everyone at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre try.

Daniel Radcliffe is the star and attraction as J. Pierrepont Finch, the window washer-turned-scheming executive at the center of this silly and very dated 1960s corporate farce, and the actor better known as Harry Potter doesn't try to coast on any movie-star wizardry. He is in nearly every scene of this two-and-three-quarter-hour musical; he mugs, he sings, he dances--not just the few simple steps that screen-to-stage actors sometimes pick up for their Broadway-musical debuts--and he does it all with a decent American accent.

John Larroquette, well cast in his own Broadway debut, gives it his smarmy all as J.B. Biggley, the World Wide Widgets president whom Finch successfully games. Derek McLane has designed a towering and very early-'60s modular set, all pastels and grays on a latticework of hexagons, like a singing three-martini lunch at whatever they're now calling Lever House restaurant. Catherine Zuber's costumes match: grays and pastels in mod slim suits and pillbox hats. And director and choreographer Rob Ashford has assembled a sprawling chorus and given them some gorgeous production numbers full of detailed, twitchy, athletic dances.

Yet for all that, even as Finch ascends the corporate ladder, How to Succeed remains stubbornly earthbound. This is partly out of fatigue--after Bye Bye Birdie and Promises, Promises, this is the third middling, Mad Men'd revival of an midcentury musical in two seasons. And it is partly because the script is so retrograde--the song "A Secretary Is Not a Toy" takes seriously the idea that she might be one, and the great ambition of the female lead, Finch's secretary and love interest, is to marry her boss and move to New Rochelle.

But it is largely because Mr. Radcliffe is wrong for his role. I have fond memories of the 1995 revival, starring Matthew Broderick, who imbued his role with Ferris Bueller's deadpan irony. His character, and that staging, consistently winked at us; his Finch knew he was full of it, and that production knew the show was ridiculous. Mr. Radcliffe's is an unironic Finch, which makes the character not a charming hondler but instead a sociopath, and Mr. Ashford's is an earnest, plodding How to Succeed. (In 1995, the unseen narrator was voiced by an avuncular Walter Cronkite; here it's a dutiful Anderson Cooper.)

Only one number here truly works: "Brotherhood of Man," just before the finale, a tongue-in-cheek ode to working together that Finch sings as his scheming is about to collapse. The song is funny and the choreography delightful, and Mr. Radcliffe hoofs through it like a veteran song-and-dance man. At last, two and a half hours in, it's theatrical success.

Ghetto Klown, at the Lyceum Theatre, is John Leguizamo's fifth one-man show, this time directed by the actor Fisher Stevens. He is a remarkable--and remarkably energetic--talent: Now 46 years old, he spends more than two hours strutting, speechifying, joking and dancing across the stage, recounting life with a distant and disapproving father, demanding and difficult co-stars and producers and, now, a loving but sometimes strained marriage.

Mr. Leguizamo's performance is electrifying. He's equally compelling and convincing when he's analytical and tender, revealing personal failings and occasionally crippling self-doubt, as he is when he's brash and bombastic, setting up punch lines and delivering biting impersonations of his Hollywood co-stars.

But his material, while expertly crafted, can also feel a little pat. It's his fifth show, and we've been down many of those roads before. And it can be hard to sympathize when this movie and TV star is bemoaning his difficulty adjusting to success and a contented home life--especially as an image of a picture-postcard West Village townhouse block is projected on the screen behind him.

The young playwright Bathsheba Doran, too, is a virtuoso of language, alternating gritty dialogue with poetic soliloquies in her
beautiful new play, Kin, at Playwrights Horizons. She has created a funny, tender and insightful examination of relationships--both the developing one between Anna (Kristen Bush), an Ivy League poetry scholar, and Sean (Patch Darragh), an Irish personal trainer, and the long-standing and frequently troubled ones between them and their families and friends.

Directed by the much-praised Sam Gold, this web of 10 characters is revealed through a series of 20 scenes, each its own nuanced portrait of one of the many interlocking relationships.

The characters all come together only for the final scene, Anna and Sean's wedding on the misty and windswept cliffs of Donegal, near Sean's boyhood home. This couple is cementing their connection, and the characters all finally understand each other, at least for the moment. But Mr. Gold douses the stage in a thick fog and plays the loud sound of crashing waves: To truly see each other, and to clearly hear, is a constant and impossible challenge.

editorial@observer.com