New Harry Potter Book and Play – The Craze Goes On

The boy who lived lives on. And on, and on, and on.

Harry Potter, the bespectacled boy wizard, has sold nearly half a billion books worldwide over the past two decades. This weekend he’s been resurrected for a new adventure.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child–Parts I and II, a play about adult Harry’s son Albus, premiered Saturday (July 30) in London, hours ahead of the midnight release of its script. With the return of the franchise come the pre-orders, launch parties, costumes, and all-Potter mania.

In Books of Wonder, the Manhattan store where JK Rowling herself promoted her first three books, five magicians, two face painters, a circus juggler, and three live owls entertained Pottermaniacs waiting for their copies Saturday night. The 36-year-old children’s bookstore ordered 1,200 copies of the script, and expected anywhere between 300 and 1,000 people to show up for the midnight release party.

New York’s massive Strand Bookstore ordered 1,000 books for its midnight launch party, and communications director Whitney Hu said that selling even half would mean they’ve had a great turn out.

The US initial print run of the script is 4.5 million, compared with the 12 million of the last original book, so it seems unlikely that the script will do quite as well as its predecessor. Still, the fervor around such a strange release has reached impressive levels.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the most pre-ordered book of the year, in print and Kindle, on Amazon, and the most pre-ordered book at Barnes & Noble since 2007, when the final volume came out.

Barnes & Noble reported that “Cursed Child” is the most heavily pre-ordered book since “Deathly Hallows.” On Amazon, “Cursed Child” has held steady at, or near, the top of the best-seller list since publication was announced in February, making it the site’s best-selling book so far this year.

The book stands apart from its early counterparts. For one thing, it’s a script, not a novel, and it wasn’t written by Rowling, although she is co-credited along with the writer, Jack Thorne, and director John Tiffany with conceiving the story. And the story focuses on Harry’s son, not the familiar boy hero and his gang.

Ms. Rowling worked on the play’s plot with the playwright Jack Thorne and the director John Tiffany, and while she helped shape the story, she has made it abundantly clear that she did not write the script.

The idea for the play, which explores Harry’s life as an adult and parent, didn’t originate with Ms. Rowling, either: She merely agreed to it when two theater producers proposed the concept.

Though it’s been nearly a decade since Ms. Rowling ended her beloved series, devotion among hard-core fans has never waned. While Ms. Rowling has moved on to writing adult fiction, she has continued to embellish the Potter universe, not just with material on her Pottermore website but also through public pronouncements about the characters.

The fans’ fervor has been steadily fed by a stream of blockbuster movies, theme parks, new short stories about the wizarding world released on Pottermore, and now, “Cursed Child,” which picks up with a scene from the epilogue in “Deathly Hallows,” as a grown-up Harry watches his own sons depart for Hogwarts.

Some booksellers and librarians say that the story’s format could introduce young readers to the pleasures of reading drama for entertainment. While most high school students are exposed to classics by Shakespeare, Sophocles and Arthur Miller, children and teenagers rarely pick up plays for fun.

“They’re going to discover how much their own imagination can add,” said Peter Glassman, the founder and owner of Books of Wonder in Manhattan.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the eighth story in the Harry Potter series and the first to be presented on stage. The play received its world premiere in London’s West End on Saturday, 30th July – (just in time for Harry’s and JK Rowling’s birthday on Sunday, 31st July) – but preview performances had already been hailed as a huge hit.

The show is already sold out until next May but 250,000 more tickets will be released next Thursday for performances up until December 2017.

source: qz.com, Irish Times, New York Times

Do you know all seven of the Harry Potter books? Can you match the short plots with the titles?

Key

1. e.

2. f.

3. a

4. f.

5. b.

6. d.

7. c.