Congratulations Harry!
You are Entertainment Weekly’s ’2011 Entertainer of the Year!’
I couldn’t be happier for you.
I guess I could have told you so in person tonight. I was in the audience for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.
For the third time.
I know, I know…but I simply had to take my friend Caroline to see it before she left town. It’s that good.
And while I had already seen it in March and April…well, that was a long, long time ago. Things might have changed. People’s performances might have altered.
And I was right.
The show was even better.
Radcliffe has often struck the ungenerous mind — mine, I mean — as a nice, lucky kid who was in the right place at the right time. He was the boy who looked like Harry Potter, therefore Hollywood made him Harry Potter. Naturally, every actor wants and needs to be thought of as more than an avatar for a trademark, but Radcliffe, Equus aside, has always given off a just-happy-to-be-here vibe. He still does, and it might be his greatest asset here. For Finch is also a bit of a blank page, one that no one can resist filling with his or her obsessions. “He has a sort of noble courage,” projects Rosemary (newcomer Rose Hemingway, bright and sweet, her voice bejeweled), the steno-pool ingenue who falls for him just-cuz — and whose head-spinningly pre-feminist motives are best left unexamined. “Yet deep down,” she goes on, “I feel that he’s sort of helpless.” Helpless Finch is most certainly not — he dispatches rival after rival with comically ruthless efficiency on his way to the top. But he has no real dreams and no real talents (apart from self-promotion), only the titular self-help book and a trajectory: up. Radcliffe’s approach to Finch samples neither Robert Morse’s love-me buffoon nor Matthew Broderick’s Kermitish ironist. He’s an adapter — he doesn’t generate his own juice, but you can run a heck of a lot of current through him. Instead of trying to light the show on fire, Radcliffe digs in, sticks every dismount with an ingenious charm I can only describe as 1,000-watt bashfulness, and has the patience to let the intensity kind of accrue around him.