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When one looks in the box, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the cat.

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Got to admit… of all the Harry Potter news I was expecting to see over the next few years, this was never in the cards.

It looks as though J.K. Rowling is going to co-produce and collaborate on a play about Harry Potter’s life before he got his fab invitation to a wizarding school. The project was conceived by producers of The Book of Mormon. (Does that mean that the show will be a musical? Please say yes.)

This is what Rowling has to say about the play, which is beginning development in 2014:

“Over the years I have received countless approaches about turning Harry Potter into a theatrical production, but Sonia and Colin’s vision was the only one that really made sense to me, and which had the sensitivity, intensity and intimacy I thought appropriate for bringing Harry’s story to the stage. After a year in gestation it is exciting to see this project moving on to the next phase.”

It’s an interesting choice, isn’t it? Rowling’s involvement makes whatever the show does canonical, but because it’s a play, the kid who plays Harry will have a lot to do with how the story is perceived. And that boy is going to be pretty darn young too; even if it’s only set a year before Philosopher’s Stone, that only makes Harry ten years. In addition, this story won’t really have magic in it—or at least, not much—because Harry doesn’t yet know about his heritage.

With that in mind, maybe it’ll read more like a Roald Dahl story. A secretly special kid who’s abused by his relatives has to handle bullying, and ocassionally finds that oddly magical things happen around him? Does that sound like the sort of play everyone’s into seeing? Will they have to release the script immediately in print so fans don’t go nuts for the fact that there’s a part of Potter canon they haven’t witnessed?

What do you guys think? Does this sound like fun to you, or does it seem like a weird move? I honestly can’t decide….


Emmet Asher-Perrin would like to play a table lamp at the Dursleys, please. You can bug her on Twitter and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

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Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Emmet Asher-Perrin is the News & Entertainment Editor of Reactor. Their words can also be perused in tomes like Queers Dig Time Lords, Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. They cannot ride a bike or bend their wrists. You can find them on Bluesky and other social media platforms where they are mostly quiet because they'd rather to you talk face-to-face.
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