"Harry Potter: The Exhibition" opens at New York's Discovery Times Square
If the books, the movies, the theme park, the paraphernalia, and soon, the e-books aren鈥檛 enough for you, you鈥檙e in luck. Harry Potter is doing the museum circuit.
opens today at Discovery Times Square in New York City. At 14,000 square feet of movie sets, costumes, and props, it鈥檚 a wizarding wonderland for Potterphiles.
For $25, visitors can visit imaginative Hogwarts classrooms and dormitories, watch the Hogwarts Express steam by, and pad through a mist-filled Forbidden Forest.
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鈥淭he filmmakers were really generous with what they gave us, and as you can see we've got some incredible artifacts,鈥� said Robin Stapley, the creative director of the exhibition, in a .
The exhibit is interactive, all the better to draw Potterphiles into the magical, breathtakingly imaginative world J.K. Rowling first created more than a decade ago with the publication of 鈥�Harry Potter and the Sorceror鈥檚 Stone,鈥� the first novel in one of the biggest accidental sensations in publishing history. Visitors can try on the Hogwarts sorting hat, shoot Quaffles, pull mandrakes from their pots 鈥� the closest most fans can get to entering Harry Potter鈥檚 world.
But if there is any world that the visitors are entering, it is the world of the Harry Potter movies, rather than the books. More behind-the-scenes than between-the-pages, the exhibit might disappoint Potter purists with its overload of more than 200 props and sets and expensive gift shop gimmicks (including $45 replicas of Albus Dumbledore鈥檚 magic wand and $50 replicas of Gryffindor鈥檚 school tie) that lend a decidedly commercial air to the creative enterprise. Some reviewers have complained the exhibit is a brilliantly arranged marketing play by Warner Bros. Appropriately, the last Harry Potter movie, produced by Warner Bros., plays this summer, the final months of the exhibit鈥檚 US run.
Still, even skeptical fans have raved about an experience they call immersive, exquisitely attuned, saturated with details, and thoroughly imagined, as one visitor wrote in . And most Potter fans, who took to the movies like warlocks to Quiddich, won鈥檛 likely find fault with the inspired, if commercialized, exhibit.
If you want to see it, now鈥檚 the time. This is the last stop on the exhibit鈥檚 US run. Some one million visitors have seen it since it began its tour in 2009, stopping in Chicago, Boston, Toronto, and Seattle. The exhibit runs until September 5 in New York, before Harry鈥檚 show flies its broomstick to more distant shores.
Husna Haq is a Monitor correspondent.
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