Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Cincinnati tickets

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child brings the Wizarding World to the stage as a live play set nineteen years after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Written by playwright Jack Thorne from an original story by J.K. Rowling, Thorne, and John Tiffany, the story follows a grown Harry, now Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at the Ministry of Magic, and his younger son Albus Severus Potter, who lands in Slytherin and struggles under the weight of his father's legacy. Critics gave the play mostly positive reviews, singling out the performances, story, illusions, and stage wizardry.

The play premiered at the Palace Theatre in London on 30 July 2016, and the response was immediate: 175,000 tickets sold in under eight hours of priority booking for the world premiere. From London it grew into a global production, opening on Broadway at the Lyric Theatre in 2018, in Melbourne and San Francisco in 2019, in Hamburg in 2021 as the first non-English-language staging, and in Toronto and Tokyo in 2022, with a North American tour launching in Chicago in 2024. Across every production worldwide, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has sold more than six million tickets.

The show began as a two-part event, built to be seen as a matinee and an evening in a single day or across two consecutive nights. In 2021 it was restaged as a single-evening show that debuted on Broadway that November, a format other productions went on to adopt. However it is staged, the heart of the experience is the same: illusions by Jamie Harrison that make the magic feel real in the room, Christine Jones's set, Neil Austin's lighting, and a score by Imogen Heap. This is wizardry performed live rather than rendered on a screen, and it is a big part of why first-timers and lifelong fans keep coming back.