‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ hits Broadway
The hotly anticipated production smashed the record for single-week ticket sales for a play.
NEW YORK – Sitting with their Starbucks drinks on a cloudy Manhattan morning, the three stars of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child seem blissfully unaware that, minutes earlier, news broke that the production smashed the Broadway record for single-week ticket sales for a play, in just its third week of previews.
Instead, Paul Thornley (Ron Weasley) is chatting about his favorite time to go to the city’s Trader Joe’s locations, while Jamie Parker (Harry Potter) muses about how he’s getting the hang of taking the 6 train on the local line vs. express.
Thornley and Parker, along with Noma Dumezweni (Hermione Granger), are all Londoners in a new city, running errands and getting acclimated to an unfamiliar place while their families and children remain overseas.
They’re all returning as the lead characters in what’s easily the year’s most hotly anticipated new play, the latest installment in J.K. Rowling’s immortal Harry Potter franchise. Cursed Child was a huge hit in its run on London’s West End, and judging from the $2 million in sales it raked in for its record-breaking week, it seems poised to replicate that success on Broadway. (The show opens Sunday.)
Cursed Child is a blockbuster production in every sense, from its five-hour run time staged in two installments, to the extensive renovations that Broadway’s Lyric Theatre made to accommodate the show. Then there are the stunning visual effects which, thanks to a #KeepTheSecrets movement imploring audience members not post details on social media, have largely stayed hush-hush.
As Parker explains, “the show’s details are there, if you go looking for it,” but there’s “something cruel” about spoiling Cursed Child’s magic.
One thing he could divulge that won’t be a surprise to any readers of Rowling’s original books is that Harry Potter — who, like the other two lead characters,
is an adult with children in the new play — struggles with the same angst he did as a teen at Hogwarts.
“Has he got past his childhood? That’s a big question. Did he ever get past 17 in the first place?” Parker asks. “And thank God he’s still surrounded by Ron and Hermione and the people who keep him on the straight and narrow, because he does take a lot of unpacking. But I think you still recognize him from the book.”
As for Ron Weasley, the goofy-asever character who provides much of Cursed Child’s comic relief, Thornley recalled the somewhat ominous advice that Rowling, who developed Cursed Child alongside director John Tiffany and writer Jack Thorne, once gave him.
“She said to me, ‘ You know, Ron is most people’s favorite character,’ ” he says. “No pressure.”
But it was Dumezweni, an awardwinning actress who was born in Swaziland, who got the most press when Cursed Child’s casting was announced for the show’s London run, with fans mostly celebrating — but sometimes questioning — the choice to cast a cast a woman of color as Hermione.
“I’m a black actress, I’m a black woman, that’s what the world has told me I am,” Dumezweni says. “I’ve got different color of skin; my melanin is bigger and much more glowy than these two boys,” she said, affectionately gesturing to her co-stars. “But this is who I am, and as an actress, I get to play Hermione. The world is saying, ‘Black Hermione,’ and I’m (saying), ‘I get to play Hermione.’ ”
She points to Hermione’s universal appeal as further evidence that her character’s skin color is beside the point. “The thing about Hermione, which is brilliant for me about her, is that every woman ... we all go to that character and go, ‘I want to be her, I want to change the world, I’m going to save my friends.’ And for me, she’s a bit of a superhero.”
Harry, Ron and Hermoine are all out- siders, Dumezweni points out. “And that’s why as human beings we go, ‘Yeah, someone else can see me.’ And that’s what J.K. Rowling did brilliantly.”
These themes of belonging and acceptance are central to Cursed Child, which, like Rowling’s original novels, tells the story of young people searching for their places in the world, and sometimes clashing with their parents along the way.
“As parents, there’s the constant, endless, unhelpful battle to be a perfect parent, at which I almost certainly fail almost every day,” Thornley says. “There is that story (in Cursed Child) for them. And also younger people (can) go, ‘Oh yeah, maybe I’m a bit like that sometimes. Maybe my dad is a bit like that sometimes.’ ”
As for the identity of the show’s titular “Cursed Child,” the three actors demurred. Yet it’s not a spoiler to say the play reflects today’s real-life sociopolitical turmoil, from warring government factions to rising authoritarian forces.
“You’ve always got to ask yourself, ‘Why this story, why now?’ “Parker says. “And (playwrights) John (Tiffany), Jack (Thorne) and Jo (Rowling) filtered it through the questions of the dangers of revising history and listening to the next generation coming up behind you, and how it’s it relevant to the biggest story at work in the world at the moment.”
“And how we as human beings connect with each other,” Dumezweni adds.
“And it’s got to be a big fun story about wizards at the same time,” Parker cracks.
And in keeping with the original books, whatever emotional catharsis viewers find in Cursed Child won’t come easily for the perpetually tortured Harry, Ron and Hermione, who, even in adulthood, are called upon to save humanity.
“Isn’t it a rare thing, telling hopeful stories now?” Parker asks. “I think we need more of that, to be honest. And it’s not about being trite or sentimental. Any of the happiness that’s found anywhere in the books, into the eighth installment and the play, is incredibly hard won. The families that we see coming to see it, they hear this story loud and clear, and by the end of it, you see generations looking at each other going, ‘Whew.’ ”