Harry Potter and the Cursed Child WandsMerchandise Broadway Review
Critic's Pick
Review: 'Harry Potter' Back Onstage, Streamlined and Yet Magical
"Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" returned to Broadway, at present in one part instead of two. It may feel smaller, but is no less dazzling.
- Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
- NYT Critic's Pick
- Broadway, Drama , Play
- 3 hours, 30 minutes
- Open up Run
- Lyric Theater, 213 W. 42nd St.
- 877-250-2929
Like a lot of children, Harry Potter grew bigger as he got older. J.K. Rowling's afterwards novels in the series came in twice as thick, or more, as the first. The lengths of the film versions peaked with the adaptation of that final book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," split into two parts running a combined four and a half hours. 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. Also split in 2, the full experience clocked in at more than v hours.
Merely now Harry seems to have shrunk. After a pandemic closure (and reported problems with production costs), "Cursed Child" has returned, shorter and more streamlined, its two parts collapsed into a unmarried one and its length reduced past a third. The creators take 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!"
The new version, which opened on Tuesday, does feel smaller — its themes starker, its concession to fandom more blatant. But as directed by Tiffany and choreographed by Steven Hoggett, with an essential score from Imogen Heap, information technology remains diamond-precipitous in its staging and dazzling in its visual imagination, as magical as any spell or potion.
The essence of the plot hasn't changed. "Cursed Child" still opens where the epilogue of "Deathly Hallows" leaves off, 19 years after the book's climactic Battle of Hogwarts. 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).
Aboard the Hogwarts Express, Albus meets Scorpius Malfoy (Brady Dalton Richards), the son of Harry'southward one-time nemesis Draco Malfoy (Aaron Bartz), who offers him sweets. Albus and Scorpius'south burgeoning friendship upsets both of their fathers, complicating already fraught relationships and imperiling the entire wizarding world. Because what is Harry Potter without a threatened apocalypse and the occasional chocolate frog?
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The audience experience begins long before the lights go down, through the sumptuous lobby and into the auditorium. Every carpet, pall, light fixture and wallpaper strip helps to immerse you into the Potterverse. It'southward a marvel of imagination, and more shows should think about extending design beyond the stage. Fifty-fifty the reminder to habiliment a mask is presented as a boarding announcement for the Hogwarts Express.
In the opening moments, that train seems to have been refitted as a high-speed rail. Everyone moved and spoke then fast — Jules and Richards were almost unintelligible — I was briefly worried that this new version was simply the old ane played at 1.five times speed. I in one case counted two consecutive seconds in which cipher happened onstage. Once only.
All the same there are excisions, most of them and so surgical you would never detect, though I did slightly miss the dear Hogwarts groundskeeper Hagrid. Other changes are more pointed, like the rendering of Albus and Scorpius'south relationship every bit explicitly romantic, which has a knock-on consequence of flattening the father-son disharmonize. Gone too are the dream sequences that bolstered the play'southward mournful tenor and provided much of its exposition.
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With a lot of that context missing, the show is at present more hard to recommend to anyone not already versed in Potteralia. (Surely there must be someone left?) The most audible reaction I heard came when a graphic symbol appear herself as Dolores Umbridge, a revelation that means nothing without knowledge of the books and films. Luckily, I had brought along my daughter, an 8-year-one-time who has made her own butterbeer and strongly identifies as a Gryffindor.
At intermission, she turned to me, eyes bright and round as golden snitches. "This movie has bang-up special effects!" she said. She ofttimes calls plays movies, a beautiful way to troll her theater critic female parent. Nonetheless, I couldn't entirely disagree. 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. This new version remains ravishingly entertaining, just is too, like the motion-picture show adaptations, a more obvious effort to cash in on Pottermania.
Nevertheless there are loads of films — fifty-fifty those with the extravagant C.G.I. budgets of the "Harry Potter" movies — that come nowhere near approaching the magic of Tiffany's staging, enhanced by Christine Jones's set, Katrina Lindsay'due south costumes, Neil Austin's lighting and Gareth Fry's sound. Jamie Harrison's illusions, the stuff of phoenix feather and unicorn horn, are an absolute astonishment. (Were fire marshals ensorcelled into approving this show's pyrotechnics?) During the sped-up beginning, I wondered, darkly, if the prove could now exist as but another theme park allure. Information technology's more than that. Besides, 3 and a one-half hours of enchantment is still a hell of a ride.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
At the Lyric Theater, Manhattan; harrypottertheplay.com. Running fourth dimension: iii hours 30 minutes.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/theater/harry-potter-cursed-child-broadway-review.html
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