11 Jul 2017 01:51 pm
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
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frayadjacentLast weekend I got to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child!
non-spoilery thoughts:
Holy shit, the staging, the effects, the music, the choreography, the whole sound design, were all fantastic.
I am SO GLAD I resisted temptation to read the script. I'd heard that the play was good because of the staging, performances, and effects, not the writing. And it was really obviously true, even not having read the script. (Of course this sucks for the many, many people who will never be able to see the play.)
Witch Please (possibly my favourite podcast of all time?) recently released a fantastic episode about Hannah's experience seeing the play.
Scorpius/Albus was the most subtexty ship I have seen since Xena. That was straight up romance. Part of me is genuinely baffled how they could have made their relationship so intense and not just let them textual boyfriends.
The actor who played Scorpius was phenomenal. This is a new actor, Samuel Blenkin. (I heard the old actor was fantastic as well.)
Part of me was disappointed, from a plot perspective, that the villain was still Voldemort/Voldemort-adjacent. (Also, Voldemort having a child was a bit much for me.) But, on the other hand, the show got a lot of emotional mileage out of going back to Harry's origin story, and emphasising that Harry is still damaged from eleven years as a lonely, abused orphan.
More on Scorpius (by far my favourite character, in isolation from the rest of the books anyway): I feel that with him they finally got to make the super nerdy, awkward, weird kids that Harry, Hermione, and Ron were supposed to be (though it's hard for Harry to ever be that when he's the star of the damn quiddich team). Emma Watson et al are wonderful, but they make it really hard to see the kids -- even in book context -- as true misfits. Scorpius was so delightfully weird and geeky and wonderful.
I wish Rose, Hermione, and Ginny had had more to do.
non-spoilery thoughts:
Holy shit, the staging, the effects, the music, the choreography, the whole sound design, were all fantastic.
I am SO GLAD I resisted temptation to read the script. I'd heard that the play was good because of the staging, performances, and effects, not the writing. And it was really obviously true, even not having read the script. (Of course this sucks for the many, many people who will never be able to see the play.)
Witch Please (possibly my favourite podcast of all time?) recently released a fantastic episode about Hannah's experience seeing the play.
Scorpius/Albus was the most subtexty ship I have seen since Xena. That was straight up romance. Part of me is genuinely baffled how they could have made their relationship so intense and not just let them textual boyfriends.
The actor who played Scorpius was phenomenal. This is a new actor, Samuel Blenkin. (I heard the old actor was fantastic as well.)
Part of me was disappointed, from a plot perspective, that the villain was still Voldemort/Voldemort-adjacent. (Also, Voldemort having a child was a bit much for me.) But, on the other hand, the show got a lot of emotional mileage out of going back to Harry's origin story, and emphasising that Harry is still damaged from eleven years as a lonely, abused orphan.
More on Scorpius (by far my favourite character, in isolation from the rest of the books anyway): I feel that with him they finally got to make the super nerdy, awkward, weird kids that Harry, Hermione, and Ron were supposed to be (though it's hard for Harry to ever be that when he's the star of the damn quiddich team). Emma Watson et al are wonderful, but they make it really hard to see the kids -- even in book context -- as true misfits. Scorpius was so delightfully weird and geeky and wonderful.
I wish Rose, Hermione, and Ginny had had more to do.