‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ Coming to Broadway in 2018
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, author J.K. Rowling’s smash theatrical production that continues the saga of the boy wizard, will head to Broadway in the spring of 2018.
The play’s producers announced their transatlantic expansion on Rowling’s Pottermore site, with the production refurbishing and remodeling Broadway’s Lyric Theatre to make it Cursed Child-ready.
‘The moment we opened in the West End, the inevitable question was ‘when are you going to Broadway?'” producer Sonia Friedman told Pottermore. “So we brought the creative team to New York in September this year to look at many of the beautiful theatres in New York City. Eventually, the team settled on The Lyric Theatre, which will be completely remodeled and reconfigured from a 1,900 seat theatre into a more intimate 1,500 seat auditorium to accommodate the dramatic look and feel of Cursed Child.”
Friedman added, “When the redesigned Lyric was presented to us as an idea and what the possibilities could be, we re-thought the whole thing and totally fell in love with the notion of a theatre being created especially for the Cursed Child.”
The two-part Harry Potter and the Cursed Child officially opened at London’s Palace Theatre in July 2016; the show is sold out through 2018. When the novelization of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child went on sale in North America in July, the book sold nearly 2 million copies in its first two days and broke Amazon’s preorder records.
While Harry Potter and the Cursed Child explores the wizard’s life after Hogwarts, Rowling also recently revealed that she transform her prequel novella Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them into its own five-part film series.
The impending arrival of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to the Lyric forced the unexpected closure of Paramour, Cirque de Soleil’s first Broadway production. “We’re not closing because business is bad,” Cirque du Soleil Theatricals CEO Scott Zeiger told Deadline of the $25 million musical. “[The Lyric] have a timeline for the work they want to do, and made the request.”