Break out your scarves, kids, a version of the award-winning play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child may be coming to a school near you.
The producers behind the Broadway and West End-produced adaptations announced a partnership with Broadway Licensing Group to bring a reworked version to high school and secondary school theater programs worldwide starting in 2024.
Producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender said “We are delighted to be working with Broadway Licensing Group so that schools around the world can stage their own productions of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. We’re very proud that over half of the play’s audiences worldwide have been first time theatregoers. With this schools version, we hope to broaden that audience even further by introducing younger generations to the magic of live theatre. We can’t wait to see how students embrace their creativity and bring the magic of the wizarding world to life on their school stages. It’s extremely exciting for us all.”
The play, produced on Broadway, London’s West End and worldwide, has sold over 6 million tickets and took home nine Olivier Awards, including Best New Play, and six Tony Awards, including Best New Play. It is currently running in London, New York, Hamburg and Tokyo, and has completed runs in Melbourne, Toronto, and San Francisco.
The play will be adapted for schools with a shorter runtime and an offering of creative techniques to convert the technical wizardry of the original production into magic that schools can achieve on modest budgets.
Broadway Licensing Group is working with the show’s creative team, including playwright Jack Thorne, director John Tiffany, Friedman and Callender to make the changes. J.K. Rowling will have sign off.
“Over twenty-five years ago, the Harry Potter book series inspired a generation of new readers,” said Neil Blair, J.K. Rowling’s agent and Founding Partner of The Blair Partnership. “Making Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the eighth story in the Harry Potter series, available for school productions around the world will inspire that same creativity, imagination, play, and storytelling through the medium of theatre, and we couldn’t be more thrilled.”
Pilot productions of the school edition will take place in the UK and US in Spring 2024, with worldwide release for schools shortly after. Amateur productions will roll out later.