NEW YORK (NYTIMES) – 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 autumn.
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 theatregoers, 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 United States on the scale of Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, and the commercial challenges faced by the theatre 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 five hours and 15 minutes.
Structured as a stage sequel to J.K. Rowling’s seven wildly popular Harry Potter novels, the show was the most expensive non-musical play to land on Broadway, costing US$35.5 million (S$47.8 million) to mount and another estimated US$33 million to redo Broadway’s Lyric Theatre.
Before the pandemic, the play was routinely grossing around US$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, directed by John Tiffany and based on a story credited to Rowling, Thorne and Tiffany.
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 US$2 million a week.
But 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.
According to the production, the play has been seen by 4.5 million people.
Tickets for the Broadway production will go on sale on July 12.
The two-part play is running in Melbourne, and is scheduled to reopen in London on Oct 14 and to resume previews in Hamburg on Dec 1.
