Cursed Child Ticket Sales Encourage Eventual Tour

The popularity of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on the West End adds fuel to the rumor mill that the show will take to the States in the near future.

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Breaking records is all part of the Harry Potter franchise’s MO, so it comes as no surprise that the latest addition to the long and illustrious saga, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, has been selling out shows almost as quickly as they’re announced. The two-part play, which has been undergoing preview performances for the past eight weeks, opens officially on July 30, but there’s little chance of fans nabbing tickets before next year.

While the show is currently sold out from its opening night through May 27, 2017, Potterheads do have a few other venues to explore if they want to grab a seat. It’s rare that the box office has any returned tickets to throw back into the mix, but the Cursed Child website gives fans another shot with their “Friday Forty”—every Friday, the site offers forty seats up on a first-come, first-serve basis. It’s a long shot, but worth a try if you’re eager enough.

If luck’s not on your side and you’re stuck wondering whether you’ll see the show in the foreseeable future, there’s still a light at the end of the tunnel. Producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender will be launching a new booking period the first week of August, which will make thousands more seats available for shows starting June 2017. Sure, it’s a ways off, but it’s better than our current state of uncertainty as to when sales will reopen for a new batch of theater-goers.

Of course, this news means next to nothing to those of us stuck thousands of miles out of where Cursed Child is being staged in London. Considering the sheer magnitude of Pottermania, it’s always seemed something of a given that the show would extend not only across the pond, but across the globe. While there’s no confirmed date or details as of yet, rumor has it that Friedman and Callender are in talks to for a Broadway stint as early as 2017.

It may sound like a fast move, but there’s no reason for those in charge to avoid expanding Cursed Child as far as it will go. One production source cites the show as “critic-proof”—that is to say, the play could ride on a wave of negative reviews and still manage to break box office sales. This is Harry Potter we’re talking about, after all, and that sort of clout lends a security net unmatched by most other fandoms.

As a devout fan of the series, I have to admit—as so many other fans already have—that it’s a bit disheartening that Harry Potter can get by on brand name and recognition alone, rather than the actual quality of the material. Our favorite boy wizard has been a business since he first took the world by storm, earning spots on bestseller lists and leaving no seat unturned during the films’ midnight premieres, launching merchandise from Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans to an entire amusement park dedicated to the Wizarding world, but at its heart of hearts Harry Potter isn’t a brand—it’s a story, and stories shouldn’t be told for cash flow or fanfare; they should be told because they’ve got something to say.

So far, reviews of Cursed Child assure fans that this extension of Harry’s journey does indeed send important messages to its audience, all just as profound as those we learned in the original series, and so one must keep the faith that the play’s availability isn’t just another money-making scheme. The fear here is that the franchise is more concerned with the monetary result of new additions to the Potterverse than it is with expanding this universe in a positive, satisfying way.

Next: Cursed Child the Most Preordered Book Since Deathly Hallows

Every fan has their opinion on this matter, and for now we can only hope that we’ll all be able to experience Cursed Child onstage in its intended medium for ourselves, even if that means putting another Galleon in someone else’s Gringotts vault.

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