‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ opens soon in Chicago, a third and final version of the epic sequel

In the theater, success typically is associated with expansion, with going bigger, broader, grander. And yet with the theatrical sequel to J.K. Rowling’s stunningly successful series of novels about a bespectacled boy-wizard and his dramatic school friends, the British director John Tiffany has, at first glance, gone in precisely the opposite direction as he has journeyed from London to Chicago. An all-new and radically shorter version of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” opens at the Nederlander Theatre on Sept. 26.

When “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” opened in London in 2016, it came in two parts, needing a pair of separate tickets and lasting the best part of six hours, all said and done. It was not a problem. Potter mania was still at a peak, audiences embraced the festival-like ethos that had been in Tiffany’s head, the plot revelations of the new, yet-to-be-published play devised by Jack Thorne, Tiffany and Rowling herself were enough to elicit audible screams of surprise and, from the moment when young Albus Potter articulated his worry that he might hate his father’s beloved Hogwarts, or that the Sorting Hat might put him not in his dad’s beloved Gryffindor but in Slytherin, the hours flew by. Audiences were amazed to be watching not just a sequel about a second generation of wizards but a play that actually unlocked some of the remaining mysteries of the novels themselves.

Anyone there saw that those first audiences easily intuited the main theme: It’s not easy living up to your parents. Especially when your dad was the famous Harry Potter, someone had to learn how to be a father without ever having parents of his own.

All the faithful had to do to know that this show was in sync with their world was to hear Rowling refer to it as the eighth (and final) “Harry Potter” story and, once at the theater, listen to the on-stage portrait painting of Dumbledore when it spoke its truth: “Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind, beyond the reach of magic. In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again.”

“You are not safe and must live your life accordingly” is the core of the Potter message throughout all of seven of the books; fans of the show were happy to “keep the secrets,” exactly as the buttons being handed out in the lobby of the Palace Theatre in the West End demanded. And most of the muggles who walked through the theater’s door soon found out that the category no longer applied to them.

Then came Broadway in 2018 . The show was every bit as good but the ticket prices were higher, the people more stressed. Donald Trump was in the White House, Slytherin appeared ascendent and Obama-era critical thinking was on the wane. Phones had wreaked more havoc on attention spans.

Then the pandemic closed everything down. Even the son of Harry Potter had no spell for that.

When “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” returned on Broadway in 2021, the two shows had been scrunched into one: 3 hours and 30 minutes meant a faster trajectory and Tiffany and his team were faced with cutting as much as creating. But he wanted the show to thrive as a single-ticket attraction. And the switcheroo proved a savvy Stateside bet. The one-show version is still running on Broadway and doing well.

Now, Tiffany and his choreographer are about to create a third and, he says, likely final version of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” with a Chicago opening night on Sept. 26. Tiffany has not given any interviews about “Harry Potter” for more than two years, feeling he had nothing left to say. But he agreed to let a visitor into rehearsal and to talk at length. And length is on his mind: the goal for the new national touring production, he says, is to come in at under three hours .

Although the run in Chicago will last through Feb. 1, this is to become the template for all national and international touring versions. For anyone who has seen the previous versions of “Cursed Child,” which features a bevy of magic tricks and a technical rig that can send scary Dementors all the way up to the balcony, the challenges of creating a version of the show that can expeditiously move by truck will be self-evident.

Matt Mueller, Ebony Blake and John Skelley in rehearsals in New York City for the North American tour of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child." (Andy Anderson)

But that’s Tiffany himself, not an assistant, sitting in the theater for a late August technical rehearsal at the Nederlander Theatre, And by his side is the revered choreographer (and high-school classmate) Steven Hoggett. Both men, who live in London, are massively in demand for new projects and have plenty of access to associates and assistants.  Why are they both in Chicago for weeks on end?

“One of the inspirations for the original two-parter was the incredible experience you’d have at festivals, watching a full day of ‘The Oresteia’ or ‘The Mahābhārata,'” Tiffany says over lunch. “I always thought there was something almost religious about that. The idea was we would recreate that in the West End. We had a very strong idea about how we would end Part One and that became where we focused our energy and it worked.”

The “it” (and that would be a spoiler) still works in London where, as Tiffany points out, “You can still see both shows for 30 quid.” But as time and geography changed, there has been a reality check. So what was it like coming up with something not much more than half the length of the original staging?

“Not easy at first,” Tiffany says. “It was a strange thing for me to do, wasn’t it? After I had got a whole team excited about this big event. But we also understood the practicalities of it. Ultimately, we want the work to be seen by as many people as possible. Each time, it has taken a second for me to realize that I do have the energy to do this, that I do have another version inside of me.”

The two-shows-to-one change on Broadway, though, was done somewhat under duress, within the context of the pandemic. In Chicago, Tiffany and his team have in someways started again from scratch but the environment has been much freer.

“This is the first time since the very first production I have been involved in the process from day one to opening night and it has been an incredible artistic challenge,” Tiffany says. “This is a company of actors who have not worked together before and it has been an absolute delight from start to finish. It’s also meant that we have had to reinvent all the production elements because much of what we have in London and New York cannot tour.”

Tiffany grew up in Northern England and, as a young person, saw his theater in the provinces. “This is the version that I would have seen,” he says. “It would have had to tour to me if I was ever going to see it. I’m massively behind this because of all the kids that we will be able to reach now and who would never have otherwise been able to see this show. That has become far more important to me that being precious about any particular element of my original production.”

Hoggett, watching a rehearsal that afternoon, makes the same populist argument in a slightly different way. “The literacy rate among boys in rural America went up massively when the Harry Potter books first came out,” he says. “This is about access .  It’s about taking the show to an audience that can’t necessarily go to Broadway and pay all that money there to see it.”

“And just look at this theater,” Tiffany says, clocking how well the show likely will sit in the fantastical former Oriental Theatre auditorium.

Aidan Close and Emmet Smith in the North American tour of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child." (Matthew Murphy)

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” has been singularly slow to roll out its tour. Attention was focused first on international productions in Australia and Japan, given the books’ global appeal, mostly put together by associates. San Francisco was chosen as the first U.S. city outside New York to get the show, despite Broadway in Chicago’s best efforts to persuade the producers otherwise. (“Hamilton,” by contrast, chose Chicago and moved far more quickly.)

But “Cursed Child,” it was clear from the start in London, had a huge Asian following and San Francisco was perceived as geographically closer to those markets and, of course, also was filled with members of that demographic. But even a decade on from its bow, huge swaths of the country never has seen the show — before Tuesday night’s first preview in Chicago, there only had ever been two U.S. cities to host the show.

“It’s still the full Harry Potter experience,” Tiffany says. “Ninety-five percent of the illusions are still in there and when it comes to the other five percent, we have found new and sometimes better ways of doing them. I think we have created something every bit as powerful and effective and dramatic as the the three-and-a-half hour version but that is a bit more user-friendly for families. People have time to have dinner now. Three and a half hours was just a very big ask.”

He pauses for a moment.

“This has taken 10 years of my life, almost full time” he says. “But I just couldn’t bear for this not to be done well in Chicago. And the best chance it has got is with the original creative team. I’m incredibly proud of it.”

In terms of theater technology, 2016 was the dark ages compared to 2024. But whatever digital temptations might now exist have been resisted. Rather, a visit to a technical rehearsal suggests, the process has been about finding new ways to execute the illusions when every stage floor and every theater is different. Trapdoors can no longer be relied upon to be in the same place, if they are present at all.

Have people moved on from Harry Potter?  Rowling, of course, has become a controversial Twitter activist in the area of gender identity, to the chagrin of some of her fans even though others have come to her defense. (“I understand you are a journalist and you have to ask but I just don’t talk about it,” Tiffany says. “It is not something that feels part of the show at all.”) And, of course, there are now no new movies to be released each year, although a TV series is planned, themed around the existing stories. One more piece of evidence of waning Pottermania was the decision of Britain’s Network Rail to this month end its long-standing, back-to-school tradition this year of a live announcement of the Hogwarts Express from Platform 9¾ at London’s King’s Cross Station.  But that decision was greeted with howls of dismay.

“The books are no less popular now,” Tiffany says. “New generations seem to be as taken with the books as when we were much younger. And we were always much closer to the books than the movies. We didn’t take any of the music from the films or even any visual reference whatsoever, really.”

Indeed not. When Albus Potter and his second-gen schoolmates gets their first glimpse of Hogwarts, they see a theater, not a historic building repurposed for cinematic use.

Tiffany, who also directed “Once,” is well known for his affection for Chicago actors, several of whom are in the show, including Larry Yando as Albus Dumbledore, Amos Diggory and Severus Snape. (Some were in the Broadway production, too.) “There is such a dedication in actors here,” Tiffany says, eyes lighting up. “Such craft and also a sense of humor.”

“What theater can do, especially with an adult Harry, even more than the books, is take an audience to a really dark place,” he goes on. “Harry can tell Albus he wishes he was not his son and Albus hears he wishes he had never been born. Imagine what that does to a 15-year-old boy. That was a bit too much for some of the Harry fans who didn’t think that Harry ever would say that. But we have a journey to go on here and what I love about fantasy is that it’s exciting and theatrical, but also that it gets to the heart of the human experience even more than realism. Harry can say the unsayable to Albus, his son . And Albus almost destroys the world because of the chaos in his mind. Because he does not feel safe .”

One begins to see why Tiffany is still here, still directing another version of the same story. Even now, it’s hard to find another that compares. “I’ve done a lot of new plays in my career,” he says. “No one is ever interested in a new play before it opens,” he says. “With this one, everyone knew the characters. And everyone cared .”

He spoke about what qualities he looks for in actors who audition for the adult Harry. “Experience with Shakespeare really helps,” he says, simply enough. “The ‘Harry Potter’ world is very similar.”

Tiffany heads off into rehearsal.

“You have to remember Harry is the savior,” he says before he goes, his voice underpinned with emotion. “So, for Albus, it’s like being the son of Nelson Mandela. And the question for us was, what would it like to be that son if you don’t thrive within that circumstance? And if you’re the famous Harry Potter, and you think you have finally achieved a stable family, what would it be like not to understand why it all goes wrong?”

“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” opens Sept. 26 and runs through Feb.1, 2025, at the Nederlander Theatre, 24 W. Randolph St.; www.broadwayinchicago.com

Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

cjones5@chicagotribune.com