[Suite One: Platform 9 ¾ by Imogen Heap – from The Cursed Child plays]
Since September, Chicago’s Theatre Scene has welcomed a new high profile and magical guest, as the North American Tour of Harry Potter and The Cursed Child has its opening six-month stop here in the Windy City.
EMMET SMITH: “it’s 19 years after the final book, and we’re on the train headed for Hogwarts, and Albus Potter who’s Harry Potter’s son meets Scorpius Malfoy, who’s Draco Malfoy’s son, and out of their forbidden friendship a great epic adventure ensues”
That’s Emmet Smith, who plays Albus Potter in the touring version of the show and a member of Northwestern’s class of 2021
The choice to have the show not be another “Harry Potter Adventure” in the vein of the books and add new characters may cause hesitancy in some, but for others it’s a welcome change of pace. Like AJ Dickerson, a sophomore theatre major who has seen the show 3 times, the most recent production being the Chicago one.
AJ DICKERSON: “ I didn’t want to hear more about Harry Potter and I did want to learn about the next generation.”
Cursed Child has had several productions since 2016, while it’s played places like Toronto, San Francisco, Tokyo, Broadway and London, it’s never had a tour, until now.
RYAN GARSON: “our director, who was here just a couple weeks ago, said, ‘We never thought this would tour.’”
That’s Ryan Garson, the company manager for the tour, and a Northwestern alumni as well. With involved effects and necessary space specifications, the group faced the challenge of making the show tourable.
GARSON: Hey, we’ve done it this way for eight years in the world. Let’s find another way to do it and to still inspire people to go back to the drawing board and say, how do we make this work? They’re like, oh well when we were challenged to do this in a different way We actually found a better way as opposed to the original way we did it. We can actually do it better, cheaper, easier, with, you know, less manpower.
And one of the “new ways of doing things” was dealing with the show’s length. This production is the shortest the show has ever been, clocking in at 2 hours and 50 minutes. To compare the versions in places like toronto and san francisco run 3 hours and 30 minutes meanwhile the one currently in London clocks in at over 5 hours.
So what caused this decision to cut nearly half of the material? Here’s Smith again.
SMITH: The biggest one is to kind of make it more accessible for folks, essentially you can see the whole story in the length of a play
Now while Smith’s first experience with the show is this newest iteration, the tour’s rehearsal and preparation process also brought on some familiar faces.
SMITH: We have the original creative team with us through our rehearsal process, which is a really rare thing for a long running show to have to have the director and folks that created it. So it’s, it’s this kind of hybrid company of returning veterans and new folks like me
One of the people returning to the show was Micheal Kras, who was with the show in Toronto and now serves as the Magic & Illusion Lead for the tour. His job involves teaching the tricks and illusions to actors and working with the team over the many many months to ensure their continued success. Kras also had the task of figuring out how to modify the magic for the tour.
MICHEAL KRAS: sometimes those changes are very small micro things, like a change in rhythm. Other times it’s a totally different technique that you’re doing. Getting to help play a role in redesigning the magic here in Chicago, whereas in Toronto, I was just sort of helping to set it and replicate what was already there. There was a bit of that this time, but there was also the chance to really kind of make things feel fresh and new and exciting again.
And these aren’t small tricks Kras and the rest of the team were having to rework and redesign.
KRAS: These are real actual legit magic tricks that these actors are learning along with learning all of the intense beats of the show, the script, all the movement, the blocking. They’re learning stuff in a matter of weeks or months that professional magicians take years of their life to learn and make look as good as these actors make it look in the show.
And it’s seeing this real magic, whether it’s a polyjuice potion or making a train from a suitcase, and trying to figure out how it works that is part of the joy of watching the show. Here’s Dickerson again.
DICKERSON: There’s a conical range of view or field of view that you want your audience to sit in where your illusions work so I was sitting right on the edge, so I was outside of that, that view so there’s a couple things that I could see
And not to be cliche and say “you simply have to see it to believe it”, but that is quite literally the case as I found out in my conversation with Kras.
CASA:Any trick you can walk me through, or is it all NDA?
KRAS: It is all so, so private, but it’s also, I mean, I wouldn’t want to spoil the magic because guaranteed, once you learn how the thing is done, it’s going to be way less fun and impressive.
Which I guess goes to show how tight a ship the Cursed Child people are running. It’s a massive show with so many puzzle pieces but as Garson told me, it’s been a truly magical experience.
GARSON: To see how it so beautifully comes together and We travel 70 people with the tour. Every single person on our team is needed to make the show happen. Even if it seems like there’s only one actor on stage, I can guarantee you there are two dozen people that are focusing and working to make that person do what they need to do, be seen, be heard. It’s the moments when you can step back, take a look at it all, and realize all of the pieces that come together to make this happen. It’s collaboration, it’s really creating magic.
[Suite Two: Staircase Ballet by Imogen Heap – from The Cursed Child plays]
Harry Potter and The Cursed Child runs at James M. Nederlander Theatre from now until February 1st 2025.
For WNUR News, I’m Sophia Casa
