Curran looks to future as magical run ends
Harry Potter is about to cast his last spell in San Francisco, as “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” plans to end its run at the Curran Theater on Sept. 11.
The most important effect of the closure, which producers Sonia Friedman Productions, Colin Callender and Harry Potter Theatrical Productions announced Thursday, July 28, is to raise exciting questions about the future of the Curran, which is among the grandest theatrical venues in San Francisco.
Before a multiyear run of “Harry Potter,” which began in 2019 and will have hit 393 performances by the time it closes, the Curran was home to an array of high-budget but daring theater that few other venues could or would pull off, including multiple productions by boundary-torpedoing maximalist Taylor Mac, Complicite’s aural odyssey “The Encounter,” and a pre-Broadway run of the equally wacky and trenchant “Soft Power” by David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori.
During the run of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” — a special effects spectacle about an adult Harry Potter and his misfit son, Albus — Ambassador Theatre Group leased the Curran from owner Carole Shorenstein Hays, the visionary but eccentric San Francisco producer of Broadway shows, most famously “Fences,” which won Tonys both for its original Broadway production and its revival.
“ATG will continue to program the Curran and we are working hard to find exciting shows to thrill and excite our audiences after ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ closes,” said Rainier Koeners, ATG San Francisco’s managing director.
The programming of the Golden Gate and Orpheum theatres (which are run by Ambassador Theatre Group via BroadwaySF and which, confusingly, Shorenstein Hays used to co-own, before a bitter split in 2019), skews more middlebrow, albeit with notable exceptions. Still, an open calendar at the Curran increases the likelihood that some of the best work out of New York, on Broadway and off, might find a venue in San Francisco.