Last week our correspondent Alyssa was able to attend Puffs, or: Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic & Magic in New York City. PUFFS takes a second look at everyone’s favorite world of wizards through the eyes of the Puffs, a lovable group of magical misfits. The full company features Langston Belton, Madeleine Bundy, Jessie Cannizzaro, Nick Carrillo, A.J. Ditty, Julie Ann Earls, James Fouhey, Andy Miller, Zac Moon, Eleanor Philips and Stephen Stout.

Puffs is playing now through the end of the year at The Elektra Theater (300 W. 43rd Street, second floor); Thursdays at 7:30pm, Fridays and Saturdays at 9:30pm. http://www. puffstheplay.com/

Warning: some mild spoilers within. Disclaimer: the reviewer is a Hufflepuff herself, and may be liable for some bias.

Since the advent of Pottermore, Hufflepuffs have had a surge in popularity. Originally framed as the ‘leftover’ house by the author and Potter fans alike, Hufflepuffs have recently been recognized and lifted up for their unglamorous but very worthy identifying traits.

Read on for the full review. More

In a new interview with The Guardian J.K. Rowling, along with director John Tiffany and playwright Jack Thorne, discusses the upcoming Harry Potter and the Cursed Child play. Even the interviewer admits that we don’t learn much new information on the play, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t valuable information in the interview:

Even in this, the only interview Rowling, Tiffany or Thorne will give before the show opens, a voluntary vow of silence about the plot is observed. “The epilogue of the seventh book is a very clear pointer as to where I was interested in going,” Rowling offers, slowly. “It’s very obvious from that epilogue that the character I was most interested in was Albus Severus Potter. And you see Scorpius on that platform.” She sits back, smiling, Sphinx-like.

Most of the interview details the friendship that has formed between Rowling, Thorne and Tiffany since beginning work on the play as well as how they all met. Rowling also points out that Thorne is the main writer for the script of the play:

“From the moment he produced the first outline, I thought bingo, that’s it.” Did she never imagine writing the play herself? After all, her other major project this year is her debut screenplay for the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, telling of the adventures of Newt Scamander in 1920s New York, decades before Harry Potter reads his book at school.

“I am not so arrogant that I think when you’ve got an absolutely top-class playwright offering to do it that I’m going to say, ‘Well, I’ve never done it before but I’ll do it.’ It’s a question of knowing the limits of your own competence. I was reasonably involved in the Potter scripts. I’m more familiar with that world. I felt a degree of confidence writing a screenplay but I had supreme confidence that Jack was going to write the play that I was going to love and he has. So you can’t ask fairer than that.”

[…]

“It is a totally new language to me,” she says. “So watching Jack and what he can do on the page and his understanding on what will then translate on to stage has been such a revelation to me. I know novels and I know movies but this is a different world entirely. Jack has access to a paintbox that I don’t have because I don’t understand the medium.”

Rowling also discusses how she has never really left Potter in her own mind and if she’ll continue working in that world:

“It was 17 years and just because I’ve stopped on the page doesn’t mean my imagination stopped,” she says. “It’s like running a very long race. You can’t just stop dead at the finishing line. I had some material and some ideas and themes, and we three [she nods at Tiffany and Thorne] made a story.”

It has been almost a decade since she put pen to paper for the final book in the sequence. “But I carry that world around in my head all the time,” she acknowledges. “I am never going to hate that world. I love that world. But there are other worlds I want to live in too. To be perfectly honest, I just feel if I enjoy it, I’ll do it – and if I don’t, I won’t.”

In fact, with the play and the screenplay, 2016 has turned out to be what she describes as “such a wizardy year”. “I always said never say never, and the reason I said that was truthfully that I did have this residue in my head in both directions – in Fantastic Beasts…, which is going back, and in this play, which is going forwards. So I still had this material in my head.

“It’s been amazing because there are roots over there and shoots over here, so it is keeping it very consistent and doing it all at the same time. We are sharing a lot between the worlds.”

They also discuss the backlash from casting a non-white actress to play Hermione.

“With my experience of social media, I thought that idiots were going to idiot,” she says. “But what can you say? That’s the way the world is. Noma was chosen because she was the best actress for the job. When John told me he’d cast her, I said, ‘Oh, that’s fabulous’ because I’d seen her in a workshop and she was fabulous.”

Unknown to Tiffany, when he made his casting call, there had in fact been a “black Hermione” theory around in Potterworld for years. Yet the strength of reaction surprised him. “I am not as Twitter familiar as Jo and Jack, so I hadn’t encountered its dark side, which is just awful,” he says. “The anonymity breeds horrors so after a while I stopped reading it. But what shocked me was the way people couldn’t visualise a non-white person as the hero of a story. It’s therefore brilliant that this has happened.”

Rowling agrees. She says there was always the possibility of Hermione being black in the way she was described; skin colour was never mentioned.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child begins previews this coming week and opens on July 30th. Tickets to the play may be purchased on the play’s website.

Continuing with their promotional photo releases, the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Facebook released photos of Draco Malfoy (Alex Price) and his son Scorpius (Anthony Boyle).

The photos can be seen in the gallery and their captions are below:

Scorpius Malfoy (Anthony Boyle) from the new play Harry Potter And The Cursed Child. J.K. Rowling: “I’ve got a feeling Scorpius is going to do nothing to turn girls off the Malfoy men…”

Draco Malfoy (Alex Price) from the new play Harry Potter And The Cursed Child. J.K. Rowling: “I love Draco and Scorpius – they actually look related.”

The Pottermore Correspondent recently posted a two part (1, 2) interview with some of the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child creative team. They spoke with director John Tiffany and writer Jack Thorne about their creative collaboration with J.K. Rowling. They talk about their first meeting with Rowling where they decided on a plot for the play:

Right now, John and Jack are on a lunch break between workshops for the Cursed Child. We’re sitting at a table covered in scripts, highlighters and blunt lead pencils.

‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’d do anything he asked me to do,’ Jack says, pointing his thumb back at John.

‘Oh, stop it,’ John says and turns to me. ‘We went to Edinburgh to Jo’s house – Jack and I. Then I sort of watched the love affair begin. You know, it’s like taking your best friend to meet your new partner and then realising… Well, it was two writers meeting, you don’t get a look in.’

‘I’d read all the books in my twenties and I’d go to the cinema and watch all the films by myself. I was deeply in love with Potter already, so the chance to do this…’ says Jack, like he still can’t believe J.K. Rowling has given him characters from those books and films to write onto the stage.

‘We started talking about ideas and her generosity in the way she listened to what was inside our heads, and then fed into that with her brilliant mind, was incredible. You were very clear back then, John, that you didn’t want to do something historical.’

‘No prequels!’ says John, echoing J.K. Rowling’s Twitter account. ‘But also, I knew from seeing the excitement in the kids I’d shared the books with that we had to bring darkness back. There had to be new jeopardy.’

Tickets for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will be available to buy online only from HarryPotterthePlay.com from 11am GMT on Wednesday 28 October, on a first come first served basis to all who have registered for priority booking, and at 11am GMT on Friday 30 October to the general public.

Entertainment Weekly has released four new images from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: The Illustrated Edition. They also had the chance to talk to illustrator Jim Kay about his inspirations. Be sure to get the book when it goes on sale October 6th, or pre-order on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk!

“I was looking at all these photographs of evacuee children from the 1940s — in England, you’d call them ‘blitz kids’ — who have been taken away from their home during the blitz. They had sort of thick, scruffy hair, and round glasses, and looked sort of underfed and malnourished, from really tough East End parts of London as well. I wanted that real character coming through, some adversity. But also slightly fragile, because he’s thin, and he’s smaller than usual.”

While talking about his portrait of Dumbledore, he says:

“What I like about early portrait painting,” Kay says, “is that you have objects in them that are representative of that person. So the dried plant there is honesty — but on the honesty is also a little camouflaged praying mantis. It’s sort of saying, there is honesty with Dumbledore, but with a catch. There’s also a little bottle of dragon’s blood because he wrote a book on dragon’s blood. And knitting because, of course, he likes to knit.”

Dumbledore’s likeness has a special place in Kay’s heart: “He’s based on an amazing illustrator I know, who I absolutely idolize. He’s been an inspiration for years for me, so it’s a huge deal that he’s lent his face to Dumbledore.”

PEZ Candy, Inc. and  Warner Bros. Consumer Products announced the newest addition to the PEZ Collector Set line earlier today: the highly requested PEZ Harry Potter Collector Set. Only 100,000 limited edition sets will be released, with each having its own number indicated on the box.

The Harry Potter Collector Set includes six fan-favorite characters as iconic PEZ dispensers, including namesake Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Albus Dumbledore, Rubeus Hagrid and Lord Voldemort. Each set also includes two six-pack PEZ candies.

“We are very excited to welcome Harry Potter to the line of PEZ Collector Sets. Harry Potter has been a recurring request from fans, young and old, for quite some time,” stated Christian Jegen, CEO/President of PEZ Candy, Inc. “We know this set will be on top of their holiday wish lists!”

The PEZ Harry Potter Collector Set is currently shipping to retailers in the United States and has a retail price of $17.99.