Anyone who tells you that adolescence is a magical time obviously doesn’t remember it and should probably go get locked inside a sword cabinet. It’s years of struggling to figure out who you actually are and whether or not the adult world will hold a place for that you. It’s fear and loneliness and ache and cringe and in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the dazzling two-part epic now making a triumphal entry onto Broadway in a Lyric Theatre kitted out in a riot of pomo-Victorian splendour, that goes double for wizards.
The plays, based on a story by JK Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne, pick up where the monstrously successful books left off, at Platform 9 and 3/4 where the grown-up heroes of the Potterverse, Hermione (Noma Dumezweni) and Ron (Paul Thornley), Harry (Jamie Parker) and Ginny (Poppy Miller), are waving on children bound for their first year at the wizarding academy Hogwarts. Rose Granger-Weasley (Susan Heyward) seems ready to storm the place; Albus Potter (Sam Clemmett) looks like he would rather hide out that storm in a cellar somewhere. His misery lifts a little when he meets Scorpius Malfoy (Anthony Boyle), the son of his dad’s school days tormentor Draco (Alex Price).
As Cursed Child is one of the most plot-heavy texts to appear on Broadway since melodrama became déclassé and suspense is the spell that keeps it whooshing along, it would be unsporting to say much more. Still, fans of the source texts (who cheered and gasped their way through a recent, all-day performance, were treated to some familiar faces. And maybe some faceless faces, too.
Cynics not already ensorcelled will wonder if Harry Potter belongs on Broadway at all and some of that wondering is valid. Like Frozen and Mean Girls and Escape to Margaritaville it’s another show capitalizing on a known and already popular quantity. It is in dialogue with its fans (how else to explain the screams of delight when Moaning Myrtle appears?) and will deeply perplex anyone who hasn’t read the delightful books or seen the so-so movies.
But unlike those musicals, which commit their material to the stage with less imagination than doggedness, Rowling, Tiffany and Thorne have reinvestigated what made the books work in the first place – a fairytale spine and psychodrama muscles all wrapped up in some incredibly specific world-building – and they’ve used their findings to craft a new story. Under Tiffany’s shoot-for-the-moon direction, they have presented it in a form that is exuberantly, flabbergastingly, Playbill-shreddingly theatrical. This is the unlikely link between Cursed Child and the pleasantly inane SpongeBob musical, another show that has decided that as long as it’s on Broadway it might as well make the most of it.
Yes, the short scenes and quick cuts owe a debt to cinema. But Steven Hoggett’s movement, Christine Jones’s set, Katrina Lindsay’s costumes, Imogen Heap’s music, plus the sound, the projections, the lights and the extremely good acting (with Parker’s anguished Harry and Boyle’s screechy phobic Scorpius both standouts), that’s all theater. The stage illusions, created by Jamie Harrison in concert with a crack team of designers, are you-won’t-believe-your-eyes stunners. Broadway hasn’t seen magic like since the profoundly embarrassing and moustached days of Merlin. Its return is thrilling.
Thorne’s eventful, jam-packed script sometimes leans on its metaphors and Freudianisms a little heavily. Who is the cursed child? There are at least six likely candidates. And it’s a shame that the script didn’t find more for the women to do. This is very much a Boy’s Own Story. Mothers and daughters are mostly surplus to requirements.
Still, most of the daughters and sons who read the books in their first printings have become mothers and fathers by now and the plays are often wise about the ways in which parents try to protect their children from the world and the ways in which children resist that protection as part of the painful and necessary process of separation and how most families, however fumblingly, will survive it. The play’s great gift is to let us know that they boy who lived has to go on living and then make room for his sons and daughter to live their own lives, too.
