Sometimes a cut is so smart, so elegant, you don’t even notice the loss. You could have sworn the script was always written that way.
At “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” nowcondensedfrom two long evenings of theater to a single three-hour, 35-minute sitting, the cut paradoxically adds to the show.
The story of a grown-up Harry Potter as a bungling father and his misunderstood adolescent son Albus often felt baggy and ditheringwhen it premieredat the Curran theater in 2019. Now streamlined, it sings. Relationships feel richer, and stone-melting, fire-spewing, bone-crunching special effects somehow pack even more power.
Trans, ally artists make their own Harry Potter art, regardless of what J.K. Rowling thinks
这个节目周四正式开放,2月24日,工程r an extended preview period and an additional two-week COVID delay, with a preshow special effect of sorts in the form of a block party on Geary Street with confetti and free butterbeer (very butterscotch-forward).
Attendees entered a costume contest in capes and scarves, ties and wands, vests and blazers with insignias, turbans and pointy witch hats. San Francisco Mayor London Breed appeared, pronouncing the date “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Day” in the city and announcing that City Hall would be lit in Hogwarts’ colors “in all the houses so everyone will feel included.”
In the show itself, which was written by Jack Thorne (and adapted from a story byJ.K. Rowling,Jack Thorne and John Tiffany), the effects byillusions and magic designer Jamie Harrisonbegin instantly, morphing street clothes into wizard capes, spouting smoke from ears, vacuuming full-size humans into a public telephone, sprouting rake-tine-sized talons from fingernails.
Lower-tech choices are just as wondrous. If you’re not familiar with the Potterverse, director Tiffany finds ingenious, economical ways to give you just enough context, often by deploying his sizable, well-honed ensemble, with movement direction by Steven Hoggett.
Need to show what a rock star Harry Potter (John Skelley) is in the wizarding world? Have someone run up to him and ask him to autograph his name in Sharpie on their belly.
Want to show how far behind Albus (Benjamin Papac) is relative to his Hogwarts peers? Choreograph a wordless sequence in which all the novice wizards are getting led around by their wands, like tails wagging their dogs, but make Albus’ clumsiness look even worse, like a goat whose front legs and hind legs have different minds.
A standout among the stellar cast, as with the pre-pandemic version, is Jon Steiger as Scorpius Malfoy, Albus’ fellow misfit at Hogwarts. He marries a range of astutely fashioned tics — a squawking timbre, gestures like a wing-flapping baby bird that keeps realizing it’s too scared to leave the nest — to impeccable comic timing and an easy, unhurried confidence. (Keep your eye on this young talent.)
The story itself combines the epic grandeur of myth — magical beings in a good-versus-evil fight in the heavens — with the time-traveling quandaries of “Back to the Future,” the if-you-were-never-born hypotheticals of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and the thrills of an adventure ride, including a very small splash zone and fireballs and flamethrower bursts — heat from which you can feel on your eyebrows many rows away from the stage.
It’s a testament to the story’s rich envisioning and the commitment of the cast that these spectacles don’t overshadow but enhance the deep feelings at the heart of the show — how hard it is for fathers and sons to say they love each other; how easy it is to take best friends for granted; how tantalizing a different life, a different family, can sound when you’re bullied.
“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” is a show where props levitate and actors fly, but it’s also one where two characters have just a few moments alive together to express the love they’ve spent a lifetime repressing, or one where the burden of reliving a traumatic origin story can be shared by the friends and family who bravely, lovingly stand side by side.
N“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”:Written by Jack Thorne, based on a story by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany. Directed by John Tiffany. Open-ended run. Three hours, 35 minutes. $69-$329. Curran, 445 Geary St., S.F.https://sf.harrypottertheplay.com