Sequels

We both slept in pretty late this morning. I had hoped that John would be right as rain after about 15 hours of sleep, but he was once again experiencing some low blood pressures. We have a little kitchenette in our studio apartment here, and he walked over to the sink or the fridge this morning, I heard a loud crash and saw that he had fallen down. He had a couple of cuts, one on his nose and another above his eye, but he was otherwise okay. 

After a couple doses of blood pressure medication, John was feeling much better and was much steadier on his feet. I asked him what he wanted to see for theater today—the great pleasure of coming to this city is the abundance of superb theater—and he really surprised me by saying that he wanted to see the Harry Potter play. Neither of us were big fans of the series, though we had both endured countless book reports on every volume that J. K. Rowling had written, we had not read most of the books. But if that was what John wanted, well, that was what I wanted us to do. I looked online and found some slightly discounted tickets. Unlike New York, where you must suffer in a long line to get cheap same-day tickets, in London they are available online. 

We took an Uber down to the Palace Theater. It had been done over for the run of this popular show. 

It is a long play, and you have to buy tickets for both Part I at 2:00 and for Part II at 7:00. I was a little nervous bringing John in the wheelchair because London theaters used to be famously inaccessible for the handicapped. But the attitude has clearly changed and the staff could not have been more helpful getting him into the theater, helping us find our seats, and making sure we knew where accessible restroom was. 

The Palace is one of the great old English theaters. We had pretty good seats, but they were a little to the side and it was hard to get a picture of the full proscenium and all the details. 

I confess that I had trouble following the play as I had only really read the first book when it came out in 1997. I had jury duty, and I was stuck at the downtown courthouse in Los Angeles waiting to see if I would be called for a case. I spent five wretched days there and was never even called in for voir dire. Maybe that colored my recollection of the book, but I did not like it all that much. I knew who Harry and Hermione and Ron were. I knew Voldemort was bad, really bad. I was surprised, though, when the curtain rose to discover that In this episode, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Harry is now much older and it is his son who is the student at Hogwarts. Naturally, father and son have a troubled relationship. There would not be much of a story without that obvious conflict. 

Even if the story was not always all that clear to me, I did enjoy the special effects. There is a lot of elaborate choreography that borders on dancing and all of that was quite well done. The sets were quite simple, but effective. They used some movable staircases quite effectively. I snapped a picture at the interval when the ushers were distracted. 

In between the first and second parts, John and I walked over to Chinatown for dinner.

In addition to all the usual Chinese fare there, mostly Cantonese, there is an abundance of other Asian eateries. John suggested one that we had been to a couple years ago, Viet Fare. we had been impressed with the food there, and two years later it was still really good. I had some Hue-style pho, and John had these amazing stir-fried pork ribs. I reflected that our meal, like the play we were watching, was a kind of sequel. And other than Beetlejuice, those are not necessarily bad things. 

As we walked back, we looked at all the bars on Old Compton and Greek streets. These are no longer the exclusively gay pubs that they used to be. At some, young straight women seemed to be the majority. 

Part II brought the play to its predictable end. I never for a moment thought that time travel would really allow Voldemort to win and indeed he was defeated with the aid of a lot of cool special effects. When it was over, I was mostly glad I had seen it.