A little context for the rest of the review: growing up, I’ll admit, I was pretty invested in the whole Harry Potter saga. At the nimble age of eight years old, I had already read different books and book series, most of which amounted to me enjoying them enough to finish them, though perhaps not much of anything else. Harry Potter, however, was different. A few chapters in, I found that what before had been a casual, once-in-a-while activity turned rapidly into a perpetual yearning to read on, to find out what happens next to the compelling set of characters.
By the seventh book, I was barely glancing at the novel’s pages with the speed I raced through them. After finishing the series, amazed by its astoundingly brilliant storyline, I hastened through J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play set 19 years after the events of the last Harry Potter book. I’ll be honest—it was frankly incredibly disappointing. Apart from its one major plot twist, the rest of the plot was boring, the characters uninteresting, the conflict tedious. After this, I wistfully gave up the saga, moved on, and never looked back.
Now, I write this not to bore you with a lackluster story about my uninspiring third-grade reading habits, but rather to hopefully convey to you the emotions I felt walking through the Nederlander Theatre in downtown a couple weeks ago. While I had forgotten most of the Harry Potter books’ storyline and certainly didn’t remember a thing from the Cursed Child, I was generally excited to see what would happen.
I sat down, the lights were dimmed, and the spotlights activated. The next three hours were wondrous. Most of the acting was great. Of the main characters, Scorpius Malfoy was played well and Albus Potter even better, as was Harry Potter. I thought Moaning Myrtle was very good, Delphi Diggory was good, Hermoine Granger was good, and the rest of the Harry Potter characters were fine. Though this wasn’t a major part, I thought Rose Granger-Weasley was somewhat irksome, but her role was obscured by the rest of the cast’s performances. By the way, here is the cast list, if you’re wondering.
Yet, it was the absolutely stupendous set and behind-the-scenes work that truly left an impression on me. There were chairs flying through the air, there were spits of fire appearing mid-air, there were characters transforming into each other.
Part of the plot included Albus and his friends traveling through time, and when doing so, the whole stage, and the rest of the room with it, in some way vibrated and quaked. When evil dementors were supposed to come haunt Scorpius and Severus Snape, they flew down from the ceiling, looking almost precisely like the monstrous beings I had imagined years ago while reading the books.
And this is exactly my biggest takeaway from the production. It was not perfect, mostly because of the material it had to work with. In my opinion, the written play’s plot is as annoyingly uninteresting as it is repetitive. Like many sequel movies and sequel series today, it unfortunately relies so heavily on longing nostalgia from people like me, that any semblance of plot detail is lost from the start.
In spite of this, the play’s production’s wholly magical feeling somehow manages to entirely overshadow this. The acting is noteworthy, the costume design is great, but these factors too are completely eclipsed by the way the play is set up. The Cursed Child, even more so than the movies, places you perhaps as close as it is possible to being part of the action, to meeting the storied Harry in real life, through the stage effects, the set, and everything else that happens behind the scenes.
In other words, it does everything that I, and I’m sure millions like me, dreamed of after first being introduced to the Boy Who Lived. It reminds you of your childhood fascination with the Harry Potter story, of the pain you felt upon learning of Albus Dumbledore’s death, of the dire yearning you before falling sleep, hoping that tomorrow an owl would fly in with your personal Hogwarts letter. Have you ever heard a song so truly beautiful that after its end, you immediately wish to go back in time, so that you can experience that feeling of listening to it for the first time again? Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is like that, but replace the song with the book series. And if you’re anything like me in this, I urge you to see it. You won’t be disappointed.
