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https://www.vogue.com/article/harry-...mpression=true
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On a wintry morning, I find myself in an airplane hangar–size soundstage in Astoria, Queens. It’s one of the few spaces in New York City vast enough to accommodate the behind-the-scenes technical magic involved in rehearsing the frantically awaited Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which appears on Broadway this month fresh from a sold-out (and ongoing) run in London. With its brick walls, garage doors, and catwalks, it feels more like a site for a gangland execution than a boarding school for young wizards.
On a raised platform, a multiethnic group of young actors in sweatpants, T-shirts, and capes is rehearsing a scene that involves a flying lesson. Behind them are a series of ornately carved arched doorways on rollers and a wooden rack from which each of the fledgling witches and wizards takes a broomstick and then lines up with it at his or her feet. “Stick out your hands out over your broom,” their teacher tells them, “and say, ‘Up!’ ” Suddenly, upon their command, the brooms rise into their hands. Though it’s a simple trick, the moment is startling and miraculous, hinting at the more impossible-seeming moments of enchantment that await.
J.K. Rowling first introduced her bespectacled boy wizard and his fantastical, morally complex universe with 1998’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Twenty years, seven books (selling more than 500 million copies), and eight films (with a combined gross of more than $7.7 billion) later, the thirst for anything Potter-related remains unslaked, making the arrival of Cursed Child on Broadway a very big deal indeed. In London, the play—the eighth and perhaps final installment in the Potter canon—drew flocks of fans in witch hats and wizard capes from all over the world while earning critical raves, breaking box-office records, and winning nine Olivier Awards. When the script was published as a book, it sold more than five million copies in North America.
For years, Rowling turned down offers to adapt her books for the theater, including one from Michael Jackson, who wanted to turn them into musicals. But when the producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender approached her with the idea of creating a new Potter story expressly for the stage, she realized that she had more to say and spent the next eighteen months collaborating with the director John Tiffany and playwright Jack Thorne to plot a new adventure for The Boy Who Lived—now a man on the cusp of middle age—and Co., retaining final say over the story line but otherwise giving her collaborators plenty of room to create something purely theatrical.
Though the internet is littered with spoilers, I have been sworn to not give away much about the plot. I can say that the play begins where Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows left off, with Harry (Jamie Parker), now Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at the Ministry of Magic, and his wife, Ginny (Poppy Miller), dropping off their son Albus Severus Potter (Sam Clemmett) to catch the Hogwarts Express to his parents’ alma mater for his first year of magical studies. Hermione Granger (Noma Dumezweni), who has become Minister for Magic, and Ron Weasley (Paul Thornley), who runs a joke shop, are there, too, seeing off their daughter Rose (Susan Heyward). I can also say that the moody, disaffected Albus, weighed down by the Potter legacy, has a troubled relationship with Harry, who is discovering that being a good father is trickier than casting an invisibility spell. At school, Albus and Scorpius, an endearingly awkward loner, strike up an unlikely friendship that gets tested when they embark on a magical time-traveling adventure and find themselves in over their heads. The trio of Harry, Hermione, and Ron shake off the dust of the years since their student days and reunite to battle the existential threat of newly resurgent dark forces, along the way reencountering some familiar faces—beloved and less so. Like Rowling’s books, the play is filled with shocking plot twists and powered by a narrative drive that will have you in its thrall for all five-and-a-half hours of the two parts’ combined running time.
Thorne comes to the project as a stage and screen writer with a precise, empathetic gift for capturing youthful alienation (he collaborated with Tiffany on the sensational stage adaptation of the preteen vampire thriller Let the Right One In). He’s also a wide-eyed, obsessive fan of Rowling’s books. As the story took shape, Thorne and his collaborators found themselves focusing on two main themes: “How you survive childhood, and how you survive adulthood when you’ve had a childhood that’s problematic.” Thorne, whose work on the show was informed both by his memories of unhappy school days and his newfound role as a father, continues, “We wanted to tell a story about kids who, unlike Harry and his friends, weren’t comfortable at Hogwarts. And we also wanted to look at what it’s like when you’re a parent reflecting on your own childhood and what that childhood made you into. Harry is at that age where he has to come to terms with things that he has never sorted out.”
Tiffany burst on the scene in 2006 as the associate director of the National Theatre of Scotland with the thrilling Black Watch, which featured a startling moment in which a slain soldier pushes his way up through the felt of a pool table, bringing ghosts of the Iraq War to life in a Scottish pub. He went on to use his signature brand of visual poetry to dazzling effect in the Tony-winning musical adaptation of Once, his abstractly lyrical revival of The Glass Menagerie, and Let The Right One In, all of which featured moments of stagecraft with visual echoes in Cursed Child. (During my visit to rehearsals for the show, I happened to walk past an empty couch just at the moment that an actor emerged headfirst from its cushions, and I thought: Of course.)
While Tiffany and his collaborators were devising the story for the play, he insisted that they give their imaginations free rein, never stopping to question the practicality of putting their flights of fancy onstage. “It all happens in the dreaming of what a story could be, especially a story of magic and wizards and witches and strange creatures,” he says. “You’ve got to be able to take that to its full conclusion.”
With his crackerjack creative team—which includes his longtime collaborator, the movement director Steven Hoggett; Christine Jones (set designer); Katrina Lindsay (costume designer); Neil Austin (lighting designer); Imogen Heap (composer and arranger); and Jamie Harrison (illusions and magic)—Tiffany has brought Rowling’s world to vivid theatrical life. It’s a dark, mysterious, broodingly Victorian world that, as is Tiffany’s specialty, seems to exist in a liminal space between the past and the present, the enchanted and the ordinary. Scenes change with the swish of a black cape; a train station becomes a forest; stairways, bookcases, and luggage come to life; smoke shoots out of boys’ ears, young wizards fly, owls swoop down to deliver messages; characters change shape and transform into each other; and marching soldiers of a dark army appear out of the blackness. This isn’t the CGI-laden spectacle of the movies, but rather what Tiffany calls the “rough magic” of theater.
Cursed Child has a cast of 40, but fans were most urgently concerned with who would play the three leads—iconic roles that remain indelibly associated with Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, whom the world watched grow up on-screen. In a nod to the Who’s Who of British acting royalty—from Michael Gambon to Maggie Smith—that played the grown-ups in the films, Tiffany turned to what he calls “real Shakespearean actors” to bring the trio of best friends into adulthood. With quintessentially English looks, Jamie Parker has starred in both Henry V and Hamlet, but he first came to attention as a public-school lad in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, which feels like good preparation for playing Harry Potter in midlife in a performance that earned him an Olivier for Best Actor. The South African–born Noma Dumezweni comes to the role of Hermione with a long list of Shakespearean credits and an Olivier for her performance in A Raisin in the Sun, and though the casting of a black actress caused some controversy in Potter-fan circles, Rowling tweeted her enthusiasm (“White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione”), and Dumezweni went on to win her second Olivier in the part. (With Ava DuVernay’s recent film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, we may be seeing a trend in heroines of color saving the world.) As Ron Weasley, Paul Thornley also brings an impressive résumé of Shakespeare plays, most of them comedies, showing a clown’s gift that’s just right for this character.
Whatever misgivings the three had about the responsibility of taking on their roles were quickly dispersed as soon as they took the stage in front of an audience in London. “That first preview was like a rock concert,” Thornley says. “It was like nothing else I’ve ever experienced as an actor.”
As parents in their late 30s and 40s, the actors relate to the struggles of their characters’ adult selves, but they found their way into the roles by turning to their own childhoods. “When I was eleven, I got on a train and went up to a boarding school in the middle of Scotland, and I wore little round glasses,” Parker recalls. “It didn’t have anything to do with wands and spells, but it’s familiar. I know this guy.”
“Hermione is a little outside of the box, not quite fitting in, but then she finds these other members of her tribe,” Dumezweni explains. “I was this immigrant girl who arrived in this country from Africa when I was eight, and my world changed overnight.” Suddenly, she says, “you’re the other, the different one. You’re good at what you do, but you’ve got to find your way, your tribe. My tribe was youth theater.”
A large part of the power of Rowling’s books comes from the way that, like most of the great works of fantasy, they return us to our own childhoods. Who doesn’t remember longing for friendship, adventure, and the power to control the world around us? Harry Potter and the Cursed Child taps into that same wellspring by showing us a new generation of wizards finding their way and an older generation reconnecting with who they once were. One of its central themes is how the past continues to exert its pull. It’s a story that flourishes on the stage, a medium that, more than any other, allows us to bring our own pasts into the present. And that, according to Tiffany, is the source of its enchantment. “It happens in the audience’s collective imagination and between the human beings in the room—the people in the audience and the group of actors onstage,” he says. “With a film, you’re very much a witness, and with a book, it’s just you. But in the theater, you’re having a shared experience—and it’s very close to utter magic.”
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Harry: "I'm lucky to have you, aren't I?" Ginny: "Extremely." ~ Harry Potter and the Cursed Child icon art by lulu
Last edited by baileycat; 03-20-2018 at 02:02 PM
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Ugh, if I was there and have tickets, I'll be super stoked and I probably won't be able to sleep. 
