Harry Potter is about to be cut. Is the new shorter play worth seeing?

And Australian audiences face their own challenge: should they snap up tickets to the original production, which ends March 27 at Melbourne’s Princess Theatre? Or take a spell and wait for the reimagined debut in May?

Over a steak frites at SoHo’s popular Balthazar’s, the show’s producer Colin Callender (a former HBO executive who began his career at London’s Royal Court Theatre) explains that the two-part version of the show was a bad fit on Broadway, where a large chunk of the audience comes in from the boroughs or further afield (70 per cent of Broadway’s box office traditionally comes from tourists).

“Now you can come into New York on a Friday night, or a Saturday night, and see [all] the show – which previously you couldn’t,” he says. “But we didn’t want to do it unless we felt we could creatively do justice to the play and protect the core of the play.”

That core is the original pitch his team used to win Rowling’s theatre rights to the first West End production. Their cue was the epilogue to the books where the hero farewells his son, Albus Severus Potter, on the train to Hogwarts. It must be tough being Harry Potter’s son, they mused. And it must be tough, too, to be Harry Potter, an orphan from a hard childhood, and navigate fatherhood.