[title]
A lot has happened since 2018. Elections, COVID-19, Taylor Swift's engagement—it's been a busy time. But after all the history that was made in the years between then and now, something new is happening. Come September 1, the Tony-winning, spectacle-laden Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will have racked up 2,328 performances at the Lyric Theatre, which officially makes it Broadway's third-longest-running play, surpassing Abie's Irish Rose.
How to make this feat clearer: Well, since the two-part (now one singular) play premiered and swept up six Tony Awards in its cloak, there have been 19 movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That's a long stretch of time.
But it's still not enough to beat Life with Father, a 1939 comedy that held court for a staggering 3,224 performances, or Tobacco Road, which ran on Broadway for 3,182 performances, from 1933 to 1941. And the title of longest-running Broadway show, full stop, is hardly within reach. That record is still held by the moody musical The Phantom of the Opera, with 13,981 performances.
This is hardly the first time Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has broken records. Guinness World Records has already crowned this wizarding venture the highest-grossing non-musical play in Broadway history, amassing over $430 million in ticket sales and shifting more than 3.5 million seats.
These stats are particularly gratifying at a time when plays don't have these sorts of lengthy runs anymore. Sure, the IP is strong here, but this is a testament as much to the stagecraft as it is to the popularity of the boy who lived.
The play has also remained adept at adapting when needed. A two-part marathon when it opened in 2018 (following its 2016 London premiere), it weathered a pandemic shutdown before reopening as a reimagined, single-evening format in December 2021. Last year, it was trimmed again, shaving its runtime down to just under three hours.
As Time Out New York's own Adam Feldman wrote in his review of the 2021 reimaging: "Reducio! After 18 months, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has returned to Broadway in a dramatically new form... Despite its shrinking, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has kept most of its charm. The spectacular set pieces of John Tiffany’s production remain—the staircase ballet, the underwater swimming scene, the gorgeous flying wraiths—but about a third of the former text has been excised."