“Dusting off the old robes. New York — see you all in February,” Grint announced on Instagram.

It took 25 years, eight films and one very famous redheaded wizard, but Rupert Grint is heading back to Hogwarts.

Grint, who first became Ron Weasley at just 11 years old, will reprise the role that made him famous in Broadway’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Now 38, Grint will play the adult Ron for a four-month engagement at the Lyric Theatre beginning February 2, 2027, through May 30.

There is something deliciously full-circle about the casting. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child begins 19 years after the events of the original Harry Potter story, finding Harry, Ron and Hermione firmly in adulthood. Ron and Hermione are married, have children of their own, and are now sending the next generation off to Hogwarts. Grint, too, has grown up, become a father and built a career beyond the franchise that first introduced him to the world.

“Ron Weasley has been a part of me since I was 11 years old and I can’t wait to meet him again in this stage of life,” Grint said in announcing his return. “There is something so full-circle and so special about stepping back into Ron’s shoes now when we are both fathers; it is somehow both very familiar and completely new.”

For Grint, Broadway itself won’t be new territory. He made his Broadway debut in 2014 in Terrence McNally’s star-packed comedy It’s Only a Play, opposite Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Stockard Channing, F. Murray Abraham and Megan Mullally. His stage work also includes the West End productions of Mojo and For the Love of a Primary School.

Since hanging up Ron’s wand after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 in 2011, Grint has deliberately moved into decidedly non-Hogwarts territory, with television work including Sick Note, Snatch and M. Night Shyamalan’s unsettling Apple TV+ series Servant. Yet he has never pretended Ron disappeared entirely. Speaking to the BBC last year about remaining associated with the character, Grint was refreshingly uncomplicated: “I’m fine with that. I think it’s great.”

He now becomes the first of the original film’s central trio—Grint, Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson—to reprise his Harry Potter role onstage.

There is another familiar Hogwarts face currently roaming the Lyric Theatre. Tom Felton, who originated Draco Malfoy onscreen, is presently playing the adult Draco in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Alas, anyone dreaming of a Ron-and-Draco reunion will need a Time-Turner: Felton’s engagement ends January 3, a month before Grint arrives.

Producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender noted that Grint isn’t simply revisiting his past but continuing a character’s journey with everything he himself has experienced since leaving Hogwarts behind.

And that’s what makes the casting irresistible. Audiences aren’t getting an actor impersonating the Ron Weasley they remember. They’re getting Ron Weasley himself, grown up alongside the actor who created him.

Twenty-five years ago, an 11-year-old Rupert Grint stepped aboard the Hogwarts Express. This February, he’s getting back on—only this time, Ron Weasley has grown up right alongside him.

Broadway history, Marc Shaiman and the man who apparently invented that little tab on your coffee-cup lid walk into a theatre. No, this isn’t the beginning of a joke. It’s what’s happening at AMT Theater this weekend.

On Saturday, August 29 at 6 p.m., Tony and Emmy Award winner and seven-time Oscar nominee Marc Shaiman will lead a post-screening conversation and Q&A following the Peabody Award-winning documentary Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy at AMT Theater, 354 West 45th Street.

The 2013 documentary explores the extraordinary influence Jewish composers and lyricists have had on the American musical—from Irving Berlin and the Gershwins to Rodgers and Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and beyond. Joining Shaiman for the conversation will be the film’s producer Al Tapper and historian Laurence Maslon.

At $10, this may be one of the best Broadway bargains currently sitting on West 45th Street.

Shaiman certainly knows something about the musical theatre. With longtime collaborator Scott Wittman, he gave Broadway Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Some Like It Hot. His film credits stretch from When Harry Met Sally… and Sleepless in Seattle to Sister Act, The American President and Mary Poppins Returns. He’ll also be signing copies of his memoir, Never Mind the Happy, following the screening.

The evening serves as something of an amuse-bouche for AMT’s next production, After All These Years: The Musicals of Al Tapper, beginning performances September 9 and opening September 10 for a four-week engagement.

Tapper has one of those résumés that sounds as though several people’s lives were accidentally stapled together. He’s written eleven musicals, hundreds of songs and produced acclaimed films including Broadway: The Golden Age, By the Legends Who Were There and Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy. And yes, according to the production, he invented the little tab on the lid of your coffee cup.

Naturally, somebody decided this man needed his own musical.

Part concert, part comedy and part affectionate roast, After All These Years travels from Stephen Sondheim to Joey Buttafuoco, stopping for Doris Day, Vladimir Putin, teenage lust, middle-aged regret and the occasional dirty martini along the way. Tapper appears onscreen while a live company performs the songs and excavates a life apparently incapable of staying in one lane.

The cast features Lara Allison (Waitress), Emily Taylor Kaufman (Legally Blonde), Dan Olson (Kinky Boots) and Nathan Pecchia (Fly By Night), with Reese Henrick and Lawson Lewallen serving as swings.

Brian Childers directs, with musical direction by David Wolfson. The creative team includes Christian Specht and Samantha Weiser on lighting, Mark Childers on projections, Cathy Small on costumes, Steven Fine on sound and Pete Dorton directing the filmed sequences.

After All These Years plays Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinees at 3 p.m., through October 10. Tickets are $50, with $25 tickets available for seniors and students.

But first comes Saturday night: a landmark Broadway documentary, three people who know more than a little about musical theatre, and Marc Shaiman with a microphone.

For ten bucks, that’s a pretty good reason to head to Theatre Row.

Tim Curry, the deliciously subversive British actor whose Dr. Frank-N-Furter changed popular culture forever, died Tuesday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 80.For millions, Curry will always be the corseted, fishnet-clad mad scientist of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or the terrifying Pennywise of Stephen King’s It, the magnificently suspicious Wadsworth of Clue, Rooster Hannigan in Annie, or the demonic Darkness in Legend. But before Hollywood discovered that extraordinary face, voice and capacity for making danger irresistible, Curry belonged to the theatre. And throughout his career, he kept coming back to it.

Born April 19, 1946, in Warrington, England, Curry studied drama and English at the University of Birmingham before beginning his professional career in the original London production of Hair in 1968, appearing as Woof and as a member of the Tribe. From there came an astonishingly eclectic collection of classical, experimental and musical theatre: Titus Andronicus, Man Is Man, The Maids, Life of Galileo, Loot, Danton’s Death and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which he played Puck.

Then, in 1973, came the role that changed everything.

Curry originated Dr. Frank-N-Furter in Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Show at London’s tiny Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. The production moved through London, then to the Roxy in Los Angeles, and finally to Broadway’s Belasco Theatre in 1975. Broadway wasn’t ready for it: the show closed after only 45 performances. History, however, had considerably different plans. Curry’s Frank-N-Furter—seductive, outrageous, dangerous, funny and utterly unconcerned with anyone else’s definition of normal—became one of the defining theatrical creations of the era. Curry received a Drama Desk nomination for the Broadway performance, and the 1975 film adaptation transformed what Broadway had rejected into a cultural phenomenon.

It would have been easy for an actor to spend the rest of his career trapped inside those fishnets. Curry did precisely the opposite.

Later in 1975, he returned to Broadway as the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, transferring with the Royal Shakespeare Company production from London to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. It was an early demonstration of something audiences would discover repeatedly: Curry could be flamboyant without being frivolous and intellectually formidable without losing the wicked glint that made watching him such fun.

In 1980, Curry took on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart opposite Ian McKellen’s Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus on Broadway. His Mozart earned Curry his first Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play as well as a Drama Desk nomination. The role demanded exactly the contradiction Curry did so well: vulgarity and genius occupying the same body, childishness sitting beside something almost touched by God.

London theatre continued to claim him. He played the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, earning an Olivier nomination, and later worked extensively at the National Theatre in The Rivals, Love for Love, Dalliance and The Threepenny Opera, playing Macheath—Mack the Knife—in the latter. He was an actor who could move from Gilbert and Sullivan to Brecht without surrendering the unmistakable quality that made him Tim Curry.

He returned to New York theatre as William Hogarth in The Art of Success at Manhattan Theatre Club and then, in 1992, returned to Broadway in the musical My Favorite Year. As the drunken, fading movie star Alan Swann, Curry found both the comedy and sadness beneath the character’s theatrical excess and earned his second Tony nomination, this time for Best Actor in a Musical.

In 2001, he played Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol at the Theater at Madison Square Garden. Then came the Broadway role that introduced an entirely new generation to Tim Curry onstage.

Eric Idle asked Curry to play King Arthur in Monty Python’s Spamalot. Curry led the original Broadway company alongside David Hyde Pierce, Hank Azaria and Sara Ramirez when the musical opened in 2005. His wonderfully exasperated, magnificently straight-faced Arthur earned him a third Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Musical. He subsequently took the role to London’s West End, earning another Olivier nomination.

Three Tony nominations across three very different performances—Mozart in Amadeus, Alan Swann in My Favorite Yearand King Arthur in Spamalot—tell their own story about his range.

His later stage appearances included The Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at Chichester and Reverend Whoopsie in Eric Idle’s What About Dick? in Los Angeles in 2012. That July, Curry suffered a major stroke that left him using a wheelchair and significantly altered the course of his performing life. He nevertheless continued working, particularly as a voice actor, and remained connected to Rocky Horror, including appearing as the Criminologist in Fox’s 2016 television version.

The screen career, of course, was extraordinary in its own right. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Annie, Clue, Legend, Home Alone 2, Muppet Treasure Island and his unforgettable Pennywise in It made Curry recognizable to generations who may never have seen him walk onto a Broadway stage. His voice alone became an instrument, leading to decades of animation and voice work and a Daytime Emmy Award.

There was something inherently theatrical about Tim Curry even when no theatre was involved. He understood entrance. He understood timing. He understood that outrageousness works best when the performer underneath it possesses absolute control. And he possessed that rare quality that cannot be taught in acting school: when Tim Curry entered a scene, your eyes went to him.

He could be sinister and hilarious in the same breath. He could make villainy seductive, absurdity sophisticated and camp genuinely dangerous. Most importantly, he never seemed to apologize for taking up the space a performance required.

Yesterday we lost Dolly Parton. Today we have lost Tim Curry. They say these things come in threes. For once, I would be delighted for the old saying to be wrong.

There are stars, there are icons, and then there are those extraordinarily rare people who somehow become part of the American vocabulary. Dolly Parton was one of them.

Dolly Parton, the singer, songwriter, actress, entrepreneur, philanthropist and gloriously self-created woman who traveled from a one-room home in the Smoky Mountains to become one of the most recognizable people in the world, died peacefully Tuesday in Nashville. She was 80.

Dolly Parton-Rockstar

It seems almost impossible to write about Dolly in the past tense because she spent seven decades making herself so vividly present. The hair. The rhinestones. The impossible fingernails. The laugh. The jokes she made about herself before anyone else could make them. But underneath the deliberately exaggerated package was something far more formidable: one of the great American songwriters and one of the shrewdest women ever to navigate show business.

Born Dolly Rebecca Parton on January 19, 1946, in Sevier County, Tennessee, she was one of 12 children raised in poverty in the Smoky Mountains. She began writing songs as a child and headed to Nashville immediately after graduating from high school. By 1967 she had joined The Porter Wagoner Show, beginning the partnership that brought her national attention but eventually became too small to contain her ambition.

When she left Wagoner in 1974, she didn’t simply say goodbye. She wrote “I Will Always Love You.” Years later, when Elvis Presley wanted to record the song but his manager demanded a share of its publishing rights, Parton refused. It was an extraordinary business decision. Whitney Houston’s 1992 recording would eventually turn the song into a worldwide phenomenon. Dolly kept her publishing. That combination—heart and steel—was Dolly.

She could write “Jolene,” one of the most instantly recognizable songs in popular music, and “Coat of Many Colors,” turning childhood poverty into something tender rather than sentimental. She crossed from country into pop with “Here You Come Again,” then walked into Hollywood opposite Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5 and proved almost immediately that she was a natural screen presence. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Steel Magnolias followed.

Then there was Dollywood. What might have looked like celebrity branding became something much larger: an economic engine in the region that created her. Her business interests eventually stretched across entertainment, hospitality and consumer products, but Dolly never seemed embarrassed by money or hypnotized by it. She understood what money could do.

That became clearest through the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, founded in 1995 to provide books to young children. Her philanthropy extended far beyond literacy, including support following the devastating Tennessee wildfires and a $1 million contribution to COVID-19 research at Vanderbilt University that helped fund work connected to the Moderna vaccine. Her family has asked that, in lieu of flowers following her death, donations be made to the Imagination Library.

Her honors became almost absurd in their abundance: Grammys, CMA Awards, a Kennedy Center Honor, induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame and, after initially protesting that she did not consider herself sufficiently rock-and-roll, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She responded to that last honor in quintessential Dolly fashion: she made a rock album.

Her private life remained remarkably private. She married Carl Dean in 1966, and while Dolly became one of the most photographed women on Earth, Dean largely declined the circus. Their marriage lasted 59 years, until his death in 2025.

Dolly’s final act may now belong to Broadway. This winter, DOLLY: A True Original Musical, the autobiographical musical she helped create, is scheduled to arrive at the St. James Theatre. Previews begin December 7, with an opening night set for January 19, 2027—Dolly Parton’s 81st birthday.

The musical features Parton’s existing songs alongside new music she wrote specifically for the stage, with a book by Parton and Maria S. Schlatter. Tony winner Bartlett Sher directs, with choreography by Mandy Moore. The score draws upon the songs through which Dolly had already been writing her autobiography for decades, including “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “9 to 5” and “I Will Always Love You.”

The date now carries a poignancy nobody intended when it was announced. What was supposed to be an 81st birthday celebration will instead become something else: Broadway opening its doors to Dolly Parton without Dolly Parton there to walk through them.

Yet there is something strangely appropriate about her having written herself into the next chapter before leaving us.

Dolly understood image better than almost anyone. She famously constructed herself from exaggeration and then spent a lifetime allowing people to underestimate the intelligence underneath it. She could be outrageous without becoming vulgar, sentimental without becoming foolish, enormously wealthy without pretending she had forgotten poverty, and deeply rooted in where she came from without allowing it to determine how far she could go.

Most importantly, she understood storytelling. She took a frightened woman begging another woman not to steal her man and made “Jolene.” She took a coat sewn from scraps and made childhood poverty beautiful. She took leaving a professional relationship and wrote one of the most enduring farewell songs ever composed. Now that song inevitably belongs to her.

Dolly Parton spent her life telling us exactly who she was, often while making us laugh so hard that we failed to notice how much truth she had slipped into the joke.

The rhinestones were real. So was the woman underneath them. Come January 19th, the lights at the St. James Theatre will rise on Dolly Parton’s story. She simply won’t be sitting there to watch it.

There is a difference between being scared and believing what is scaring you. Paranormal Activity, now on Broadway, is extremely good at the former and astonishingly bad at the latter. There are moments when the sound, darkness, video projections by Luke Halls and special effects by Chris Fisher genuinely make you jump out of your skin. Unfortunately, once your heart rate returns to normal, your brain begins asking questions, and playwright Levi Holloway’s script would really prefer that it didn’t.

photo by
Matthew Murphy

Holloway, who also wrote Grey House, clearly knows how to manufacture dread. What he doesn’t seem particularly interested in understanding is the supernatural world he is writing about. Psychic ability, hauntings, intuition and unexplained phenomena are treated primarily as mechanisms for the next scare rather than experiences governed by any internal logic. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to write convincingly about them, but you do have to understand the world you’re creating well enough to establish its rules. Paranormal Activity keeps changing the rules whenever the next twist requires it.

I attended with Friday Jones, an astrologer, psychic and artist, who came out wondering whether the script had been written by AI because the fingerprints were everywhere, including its “not this, but that” rhetorical cadence tagline. Indeed, its twists and turns seemed quite disconnected from recognizable human logic. That may be unfair to AI, but I understood exactly what she meant. Things happen because the play needs something to happen, not because the characters’ previous behavior makes the next choice remotely plausible.

Cher Álvarez photo by Matthew Murphy

The premise brings Lou, played by Cher Álvarez , and her husband James, played by Travis A. Knight, from Chicago to London, where they are apparently hoping geography will solve what followed them in America. It doesn’t. Strange things begin happening again almost immediately. This should be terrifying, particularly because Lou has already experienced unexplained phenomena and James has already spent considerable time refusing to believe her. Yet even when the evidence begins practically introducing itself to him, James remains remarkably resistant to the obvious. At some point disbelief stops being skepticism and becomes stupidity.

Travis A. Knight photo by Matthew Murphy

If you move into a house and discover within a day that it appears violently haunted—particularly after leaving another city under similarly disturbing circumstances—how long are you staying? More importantly, how many impossible things does your spouse have to witness before you stop behaving as though she simply needs a good night’s sleep? The audience sees enough to become frightened long before James seems emotionally capable of processing what is happening in his own home. That gap becomes fatal to the story because we are more alarmed for these people than they appear to be for themselves.

Alvarez’s Lou has the more difficult assignment because she must carry much of the supernatural burden of the story, yet the character never becomes as vulnerable as the circumstances demand. Knight fares no better because James has been written into a state of prolonged disbelief that eventually becomes impossible to defend. These are not bad actors. They are actors being asked to make human sense of behavior that frequently has none.

Then there are plot developments so improbable that the supernatural elements begin looking positively reasonable by comparison. Without giving away the larger machinery, there is a sequence involving a 12-year-old child, alone and soaked from the rain on an isolated road late during a violent storm. By that point I wasn’t asking whether ghosts exist. I was asking what 12-year-old is wandering around out there, why, and what adult writing this thought the situation required no further explanation.

That is the peculiar failure of Paranormal Activity. The ghosts aren’t what strain credibility. The humans do.

What nearly saves the evening is the production itself. Director Felix Barrett, the visionary behind Sleep No More, knows exactly how to manipulate an audience’s attention. He understands anticipation, silence and the unbearable seconds before something happens. His favorite theatrical moments are pregnant pauses. Given a script that frequently refuses to make sense, Barrett nevertheless constructs an extraordinarily effective theatrical funhouse.

When the Chris Fisher’s effects arrive, they are terrific. There are approximately five major effects that genuinely work, including one that is spectacular. I won’t spoil them because surprise is almost the entire pleasure of this production. They are beautifully engineered and timed, and several produced exactly the response intended: screams, gasps and that wonderful collective Broadway moment when hundreds of people simultaneously wonder what the hell they just saw.

Gareth Fry’s sound design may be the production’s greatest weapon. Fry doesn’t merely make things loud, though ear shattering he does; he makes the theatre itself feel dangerous. Sound comes from places your nervous system doesn’t expect, and there are moments when you genuinely feel as though something terrible is about to happen directly beside you. Anna Watson’s lighting is equally effective, particularly her use of darkness. This is darkness with purpose. We become afraid not simply of what we see, but of what Watson deliberately refuses to let us see. The house by Fly Davis gives us multiple levels, but there is also a problem here. They just moved in and it seems very lived in.

Shannon Cochran fares best as James’s mother, Carolanne. She understands that menace becomes more effective when it isn’t being announced, and she brings an unsettling quality to the role that the play desperately needs. Eva Kaminsky, as psychic Etheline, should provide the supernatural credibility that grounds everything else, but the character never feels authentic enough to do so. Again, the problem originates in the writing. If your psychic exists primarily to deliver supernatural information rather than behaving like someone who actually inhabits that sensibility, she becomes another theatrical device.

I came to Paranormal Activity having never seen the film franchise, which turned out to be useful. I wasn’t arriving with affection for the mythology, waiting for familiar references or comparing theatrical moments with their cinematic predecessors. I could simply ask whether the play standing in front of me worked. As a carnival ride, absolutely. As a play, no.

There is considerable theatrical talent on display at Paranormal Activity. Barrett knows how to scare us. Fry knows how to make the building feel possessed. Watson knows how frightening darkness can become, and Fisher the illusion designer knows precisely how to make an audience scream.

But after the scream comes the question. Why? Far too often, Paranormal Activity doesn’t have an answer. It has another effect.

Travis A. Knight and Cher Álvarez photo by
Matthew Murphy

For an evening built around things that cannot be explained, that might sound appropriate. It isn’t. The supernatural doesn’t require realism, but good storytelling requires internal truth. Give me ghosts. Give me psychics. Give me things moving in dark rooms and forces we cannot understand. Just make me believe the people living through it.

Paranormal Activity scared me several times.  I didn’t believe it for a minute.