Harry Potter (Fictional Character)

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      in Movies

      'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child' Review: Still Magical on Broadway

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      “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” returned to Broadway, now in one part instead of two. It may feel smaller, but is no less dazzling.Like a lot of children, Harry Potter grew bigger as he got older. J.K. Rowling’s later 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 volume, “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 two, the total experience clocked in at more than five hours.But 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 single one and its length reduced by a third. The creators have 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, it remains diamond-sharp 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’s former nemesis Draco Malfoy (Aaron Bartz), who offers him sweets. Albus and Scorpius’s 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?Richards, left, as Scorpius Malfoy with a Dementor in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe audience experience begins long before the lights go down, through the sumptuous lobby and into the auditorium. Every carpet, curtain, light fixture and wallpaper strip helps to immerse you into the Potterverse. It’s a marvel of imagination, and more shows should think about extending design beyond the stage. Even the reminder to wear 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 so fast — Jules and Richards were almost unintelligible — I was briefly worried that this new version was simply the old one played at 1.5 times speed. I once counted two consecutive seconds in which nothing happened onstage. Once only.Yet there are excisions, most of them so surgical you would never notice, though I did slightly miss the beloved Hogwarts groundskeeper Hagrid. Other changes are more pointed, like the rendering of Albus and Scorpius’s relationship as explicitly romantic, which has a knock-on effect of flattening the father-son conflict. Gone too are the dream sequences that bolstered the play’s mournful tenor and provided much of its exposition.Steve Haggard, left, as Harry Potter and James Romney as Albus Potter.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWith a lot of that context missing, the show is now more difficult to recommend to anyone not already versed in Potteralia. (Surely there must be someone left?) The most audible reaction I heard came when a character announced 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-old 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 great special effects!” she said. She often calls plays movies, a beautiful way to troll her theater critic mother. Still, 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, but is also, like the movie adaptations, a more obvious attempt to cash in on Pottermania.Yet there are loads of films — even 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’s 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 show could now exist as just another theme park attraction. It’s more than that. Besides, three and a half hours of enchantment is still a hell of a ride.Harry Potter and the Cursed ChildAt the Lyric Theater, Manhattan; harrypottertheplay.com. Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ to Slim Down Before Broadway Return

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      Reducio! The play, which had been performed in two parts, will be condensed and restaged in one part when it returns this fall.“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the sprawling stage play that imagines Harry and his friends as grown-ups and their children as wizards-in-training, will be substantially restructured before returning to Broadway this fall.The play, which had been staged in two parts before the pandemic, will return as a single show on Nov. 16.The show was widely acclaimed, winning the Olivier Award for best new play when it opened in London, and the Tony Award for best new play when it opened in New York. But it was costly to develop, costly to run, and costly for theatergoers, who had to buy tickets to two shows to experience it fully.The play’s lead producers, Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, in a joint statement attributed their decision to “the challenges of remounting and running a two-part show in the U.S. on the scale of ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,’ and the commercial challenges faced by the theater and tourism industries emerging from the global shutdowns.”The show will continue to run in two parts in London; Melbourne, Australia; and Hamburg, Germany, but will be a single part in New York, San Francisco and Toronto. It was not immediately clear how long that single part would be; the two parts have a total running time of about 5 hours and 15 minutes.Structured essentially as a stage sequel to J.K. Rowling’s seven wildly popular “Harry Potter” novels, the show was the most expensive nonmusical play ever to land on Broadway, costing $35.5 million to mount, and another estimated $33 million to redo Broadway’s Lyric Theater. Before the pandemic, the play was routinely grossing around $1 million a week on Broadway — an enviable number for most plays, but not enough for this one, with its large company and the expensive technical elements that undergird its stage magic.The play, a high-stakes magical adventure story with thematic through lines about growing up and raising children, was written by Jack Thorne and directed by John Tiffany, based on a story credited to Rowling, Thorne and Tiffany. Thorne and Tiffany said they had been working on a new version of the show during the pandemic, which, they said, “has given us a unique opportunity to look at the play with fresh eyes.”The writers did not say what kind of changes they would make, but the production promised that the new version would still deliver “all the amazing magic, illusions, stagecraft and storytelling set around the same powerful narrative.”“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” began its stage life in London, opening in the summer of 2016, and winning nine Olivier awards — the most of any play — in 2017. It arrived on Broadway in 2018, picked up six Tony Awards, and initially sold very strongly, grossing about $2 million a week. But the sales softened over time, as average ticket prices fell, apparently because of a combination of the lengthy time commitment and the need to buy two tickets to see the whole story, which made it particularly expensive for families.The show has been expanding globally — adding productions in San Francisco and Australia, and planning its first production in a language other than English for Hamburg — making restructuring complicated. But the producers have apparently decided to go to a one-part structure in North America, while maintaining the two-part structure elsewhere in the world, as they try to find the formula for long-term global success. According to the production, the play has already been seen by 4.5 million people.Tickets for the Broadway production will go on sale July 12; ticket prices have not yet been announced. The San Francisco production is scheduled to resume performances at the Curran theater next Jan. 11, and the Toronto production is to begin performances next May at the Ed Mirvish Theater.The two-part play is already running in Melbourne and is scheduled to reopen in London on Oct. 14 and to resume previews in Hamburg on Dec. 1. More

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      in Television

      Helen McCrory, British Star of Stage, Film and TV, Dies at 52

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      She was acclaimed for her work on the TV series “Peaky Blinders” and in three Harry Potter movies, but she first gained notice in the London theater.Helen McCrory, the accomplished and versatile British stage and screen actress who played Narcissa Malfoy in three Harry Potter films and the matriarch Polly Gray on the BBC series “Peaky Blinders,” in addition to earning critical plaudits for her stage work, has died at her home in north London. She was 52.Her death, from, cancer, was announced on social media on Friday by her husband, the actor Damian Lewis.Ms. McCrory was a familiar face to London theater audiences and to British television and film viewers well before she won wider recognition in the Harry Potter movies. She began her career in the theater in 1990, straight out of drama school, playing Gwendolen in a production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” in Harrogate, Yorkshire. In 1993, the director Richard Eyre, who was the head of the National Theater, cast her in the leading role in his production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s comic play “Trelawny of the ‘Wells,’” for which she earned glowing reviews.“Helen McCrory, in the title role, perfectly captures Rose’s crossover from a lovelorn ingénue to wounded woman,” Sheridan Morley wrote in The International Herald Tribune.The next year she played Nina in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” at the National Theater, alongside Judi Dench and Bill Nighy, and in 1995 she was named “most promising newcomer” in the Shakespeare Globe Awards for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth in the West End.Ms. McCrory worked steadily in the theater over the next two decades, with notable appearances as Yelena in Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” in 2002; as Rosalind in “As You Like It” in 2005 (which earned her an Olivier Award nomination for best actress); as Rebecca West in Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” in 2008; and as Medea in 2016.“Portrayed with unsettling accessibility and nerves of piano wire by Helen McCrory,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times, “the Medea of ancient myth has become the sad but scary crazy lady next door, the kind who inspires you to lock up your children.”But as early as 1994, Ms. McCrory was also venturing into film and television work. In 2003 she appeared as Barbara Villiers, the mistress of Charles II, in Joe Wright’s four-part series “Charles II: The Power and the Passion,” and in 2006 she made a cameo appearance as Cherie Blair, the wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair, in Stephen Frears’s “The Queen” — a role she reprised in the 2010 film “The Special Relationship,” written, as was “The Queen,” by Peter Morgan.Ms. McCrory became known to worldwide audiences through her 2009 role as Narcissa Malfoy, the mother of Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy, in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” She played the role again in Parts 1 and 2 of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the final films in the series. (She had in fact been slated for a larger role, as Bellatrix Lestrange, in the earlier “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” but had been forced to withdraw after discovering she was pregnant; Helena Bonham Carter took over.)She was good at playing villains — the evil alien Rosanna Calvierri in an episode of “Doctor Who,” the spiritualist Evelyn Poole in the series “Penny Dreadful,” and, perhaps most notably, Polly Gray, the aunt of the gang boss Tommy Shelby, on the period crime drama “Peaky Blinders,” a role she played for its entire five-season run, from 2013 to 2019.Ms. McCrory with Jason Isaacs, left, and Tom Felton in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” (2011).Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Brothers PicturesHelen Elizabeth McCrory was born on Aug. 17, 1968, in the Paddington neighborhood of London, the eldest of three children. Her father, Iain McCrory, was a diplomat; her mother, Ann (Morgans) McCrory, worked for the National Health Service.During her childhood, her father’s work for the Foreign Service took the family to Tanzania, Norway, Madagascar and Paris.“Dad tells me my first appearance onstage was dancing during an official visit by the French president,” Ms. McCrory said in a 2014 interview with The Times of London. “I’m pretty sure the idea of being an actress came to me around that time. Every evening at the house was like a little concert.”In her teens she was sent back to England, to the Queenswood School for Girls in Hertfordshire. She began to act while there and, after graduating, spent a year traveling around Italy before being accepted at the Drama Center London.Being an actress “was the only thing I wanted to be,” she told The Times of London in 2017, adding that she had been “incredibly lucky” to be quickly given major roles.Ms. McCrory met Mr. Lewis in 2003, when they were both appearing in Joanna Laurens’s “Five Gold Rings” at the Almeida Theater in London. “Damian’s naughty, and I’ve always loved my naughty boys,” she said last year on the BBC 4 radio program “Desert Island Discs.” They had two children, Manon in 2006 and Gulliver in 2007, and married in 2007. Although Mr. Lewis also found fame, on the television series “Homeland” and “Billions,” they maintained a low-key life in London.Ms. McCrory with her husband, the actor Damian Lewis, in London in 2017 after she was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire.Pool photo by Wpa“I’m much happier as I’ve got older,” Ms. McCrory told The Times of London in 2016. “Age has given me nothing but confidence, security and joy.” She added, “To me, ‘Helen McCrory, 47’ means nothing. ‘Helen McCrory, bad housewife and argumentative after a bottle of gin’ would be much more relevant.”In recent years she appeared on TV in leading roles in David Hare’s political drama “Roadkill” and James Graham’s “Quiz” and as the voice of a daemon in “His Dark Materials.”Last year, Ms. McCrory and Mr. Lewis spearheaded a fund-raising effort to provide meals for members of the National Health staff amid the coronavirus pandemic. Their work led to donations of close to £1 million ($1.4 million) to the Feed NHS Scheme. Just a month ago, on March 12, she appeared with Mr. Lewis on ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” to discuss the project.Her illness was not widely known, and her death came as a surprise to most. Complete information on survivors, in addition to her husband and children, was not immediately available. More