Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a fantasy play, not a musical, that carries J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels into the next generation. Nineteen years have gone by since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Harry is a working father now, and the play follows his troubled bond with his younger son, Albus, along with the friendship Albus forms with the son of Harry's old rival, Draco Malfoy. A stolen Time-Turner sets the plot in motion.

Jack Thorne wrote the script from an original story he developed with Rowling and the director John Tiffany. The producers present it as the eighth Harry Potter story and the first official one made for the stage. It began in London's West End in 2016 and came to the Lyric Theatre on Broadway, where it opened on April 22, 2018.

The Broadway production won six Tony Awards in 2018, Best Play among them, a year after the London staging collected nine Laurence Olivier Awards. Conceived in two parts, it has been performed on Broadway since November 2021 as a single show with one intermission.

The opening scene takes place at King's Cross, where Harry and Ginny Potter send Albus off to his first year at Hogwarts. It is the very moment that ends the last novel, so readers begin on familiar ground. On the Hogwarts Express, Albus makes friends with Scorpius Malfoy, Draco's son. Soon after, he is sorted into Slytherin rather than Gryffindor.

The grown-ups from the books have settled into careers. Harry heads law enforcement at the Ministry of Magic. Hermione Granger has become Minister for Magic, Ginny edits the sports pages of the Daily Prophet, and Ron Weasley runs the joke shop with George.

Year after year at school, Albus feels he can never measure up to the Potter name, while Scorpius lives with gossip about who his father really is. Meanwhile Harry and Albus stop understanding each other. Following one especially harsh fight with his father, Albus sets out to repair an old injustice by saving Cedric Diggory. Cedric's elderly father, Amos, has pleaded with Harry for help, and Albus decides to take the job on himself.

With help from Delphi, who looks after Amos, the boys disguise themselves with Polyjuice and take a Time-Turner from the Ministry of Magic. Their visits to the Triwizard Tournament ripple forward and alter the present in ways they did not foresee. At the same time, Harry's scar starts to hurt again. The tone shifts between family drama and fantasy adventure. This guide stops at the setup and leaves the twists for the theater.

Instead of adapting one of the novels, Thorne, Rowling and Tiffany wrote a new chapter set after the books end, while the script itself is credited to Thorne alone. The action moves among Hogwarts, the Ministry of Magic, the Hogwarts Express and Godric's Hollow.

The play was planned as a two-part event, a split Rowling announced on September 24, 2015. The script also appeared in print as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Parts One and Two: a rehearsal edition on July 31, 2016, followed by a definitive edition on July 25, 2017. For the one-part version, more than 90 minutes of material were removed, including dream sequences with young Harry, the Dursleys and Hagrid; the trimmed script is reported to make the bond between Albus and Scorpius more openly romantic. Another round of cuts on November 12, 2024, brought the evening in at under three hours.

Imogen Heap composed the original score and shares the arranging credit with Martin Lowe, the music supervisor. Heap's music won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play. Her album The Music of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - In Four Contemporary Suites came out in 2018 and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Musical Theater Album.

Much of the recognition for this show went to its stagecraft. Beyond the design Tonys, the New York Drama Critics' Circle gave the production a special citation for staging, design and illusions. Expect illusions, video projection, lighting and sound to work together with Heap's score. Jeremy Chernick designed special effects for the original production. The caged birds you see are props; the production uses no live animals.

As of October 2026, John Skelley plays Harry Potter, Trish Lindstrom plays Ginny Potter, Emmet Smith plays Albus Potter and Aidan Close plays Scorpius Malfoy. Rachel Christopher is Hermione Granger, Daniel Fredrick is Ron Weasley, Janae Hammond is Rose Granger-Weasley and Kristen Martin is Delphi Diggory.

As of October 2026, Draco Malfoy is played by Tom Felton, who played the same character in the Harry Potter films. He joined the company in November 2025 for his Broadway debut, the first actor from the films to take his role into the play. His final performance is scheduled for January 3, 2027, and he is off at a few announced performances before then. Rupert Grint, Ron in the films, later joins the company as Ron for a 17-week limited engagement, February 2 to May 30, 2027, which was announced on August 26, 2026. The two runs do not overlap.

A Harry Potter stage play was first announced as being in development in December 2013. The world premiere took place at the Palace Theatre in London, with a first preview on June 7, 2016, and an official opening on July 30, 2016. The move to Broadway was announced on May 4, 2017. To prepare the Lyric Theatre, which had previously housed Cirque du Soleil's Paramour, the building was heavily renovated: about 400 seats came out and the entrance was relocated to West 43rd Street. The production was estimated to be the most expensive non-musical play ever staged on Broadway.

Broadway previews began on March 16, 2018, and the official opening followed on April 22, 2018. The principal London cast transferred with the play, among them Jamie Parker as Harry, Noma Dumezweni as Hermione, Paul Thornley as Ron, Poppy Miller as Ginny, Alex Price as Draco, Sam Clemmett as Albus and Anthony Boyle as Scorpius.

The COVID-19 pandemic stopped performances on March 12, 2020. When the curtain went up again on November 12, 2021, the two parts had become one. The North American tour opened on September 10, 2024, at the James M. Nederlander Theatre in Chicago, and that November Broadway switched to the tour's shorter cut. In London, the two-part version gave its final performance on September 20, 2026, and the Palace Theatre production returned in one-part form on October 9, 2026.

Productions elsewhere opened in Melbourne at the Princess Theatre (February 23, 2019); in San Francisco at the Curran Theatre (December 1, 2019); in Hamburg (December 5, 2021), the first staging in a language other than English; in Toronto at the Ed Mirvish Theatre (June 19, 2022); and in Tokyo at the TBS Akasaka ACT Theater (July 8, 2022). A Dutch-language one-part production premiered in The Hague on March 14, 2026, and an edition for high school productions was prepared in fall 2024. By 2026, productions around the world were reported to have sold more than six million tickets.

The Broadway run has also set box-office records. Its holiday week at the end of December 2023 brought what was then the top weekly gross for a non-musical play, and by 2025 it was reported to be the highest-grossing non-musical play in Broadway history. In the week ending November 23, 2025, Tom Felton's second week in the cast, it broke the Lyric Theatre's house record for an eight-performance week.