Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been enthralling audiences in Melbourne as a two-part epic for some time now but it’s about to be reimagined in a shorter form.
The acclaimed production has been a Princess Theatre mainstay, selling out most weeks. The length, though, hasn’t been for everyone – running for five hours over two parts, that’s a lot of the Wizarding World all at once.
Maybe it’s a blessing, then, that the show is set to continued its Melbourne season as a reworked one-part performance. From May onwards, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child won’t feel like such a marathon thanks to a more concise production.
“As a starting point, we had to include all the illusions, all the magic, all the special effects. everything that people would say ‘oh my goodness how on earth did they do that’. We wanted to keep all of that in the new one-part, and one of the challenges was finding a version which kept all of that, while at the same time telling the story,” producer Colin Callender told The Urban List.
For a show filled with several detailed storylines, it was important to stay as true to the story as possible in the reworked version. “We didn’t let go of anything that we thought was fundamentally central to the story,” Callender added. “And so, in the end we wanted to protect the story of Albus and Scorpius, and we wanted to protect the story of Harry and his son, and I feel as though we’ve done that.”
If you want to catch the two-part epic version of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, you can do until Sunday, March 27th. The one-part performance will then run from Monday, March 4th until further notice. Full ticket information can be found on the show’s official website.
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