This new version remains ravishingly entertaining, but is also, like the movie adaptations, a more obvious attempt to cash in on Pottermania. The original “Cursed Child,” with its luxuriant running time and hyperfocus - for better and worse - on the emotional lives of its characters, felt explicitly theatrical, the wresting of a real work of dramatic art from a massively popular franchise. She often calls plays movies, a beautiful way to troll her theater critic mother. “This movie has great special effects!” she said. Luckily, I had brought along my daughter, an 8-year-old who has made her own butterbeer and strongly identifies as a Gryffindor.Īt intermission, she turned to me, eyes bright and round as golden snitches. (Surely there must be someone left?) The most audible reaction I heard came when a character announced herself as Dolores Umbridge, a revelation that means nothing without knowledge of the books and films. With a lot of that context missing, the show is now more difficult to recommend to anyone not already versed in Potteralia. On their way to that school of witchcraft and wizardry are Albus Potter (James Romney) - the second son of Harry Potter (Steve Haggard, in for James Snyder at the performance I attended) and Ginny Potter (Diane Davis) - and Rose Granger-Weasley (Nadia Brown), the daughter of Hermione Granger (Jenny Jules) and Ron Weasley (David Abeles). “Cursed Child” still opens where the epilogue of “Deathly Hallows” leaves off, 19 years after the book’s climactic Battle of Hogwarts. But as directed by Tiffany and choreographed by Steven Hoggett, with an essential score from Imogen Heap, it remains diamond-sharp in its staging and dazzling in its visual imagination, as magical as any spell or potion.

The new version, which opened on Tuesday, does feel smaller - its themes starker, its concession to fandom more blatant. The creators have kept quiet on the mechanics of this revision call it “Harry Potter and the Mysterious Abridgment.” I assume someone pointed a wand at the published script and shouted, “Brevioso!” After a pandemic closure (and reported problems with production costs), “Cursed Child” has returned, shorter and more streamlined, its two parts collapsed into a single one and its length reduced by a third.

Also split in two, the total experience clocked in at more than five hours.īut now Harry seems to have shrunk. In 2018, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” - an original play by Jack Thorne, based on a story by Thorne, Rowling and John Tiffany - opened on Broadway at the lavishly remodeled Lyric Theater. The lengths of the film versions peaked with the adaptation of that final volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” split into two parts running a combined four and a half hours. Rowling’s later novels in the series came in twice as thick, or more, as the first.

Like a lot of children, Harry Potter grew bigger as he got older.

Hild book review