`Potted Potter' looks to cast a spell in S.F.
Long-running spoof is based on love for books and movies
It's hard to believe that there's anyone in a large portion of the world — let alone in the Bay Area — entirely unaware of Harry Potter. Even those who haven't read the children's novels by J.K. Rowling or seen the movie versions have probably heard of the wizard school Hogwarts, the broomstick sport Quidditch, and quite possibly the four “houses” into which the students are sorted.
For any as yet uninitiated and for diehard Potter fans alike, there's a madcap summary coming to town.
A West End hit created and originally performed by Daniel Clarkson and Jefferson Turner, “Potted Potter: The Unauthorized Harry Experience — A Parody by Dan & Jeff” speeds through all seven Harry Potter novels in 70 minutes. While touring the show hither and yon, either performing it themselves or passing it along to other pairs, Clarkson and Turner created similar parodies, such as “Potted Pirates,” “Potted Panto” and “Potted Sherlock.”
Currently performed by an Englishman, Joseph Maudsley, and a Scot, Scott Hoatson, each of whom has been doing the show for about eight years, “Potted Potter” now returns to San Francisco for a threeweek run at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre.
In British parlance, “potted” means condensed and simplified for descriptive purposes. It also means preserved in jars like meat or fish, but one can only hope that's not what's going on
with Harry here.
“It's the CliffNotes of it,” Maudsley says. “You're going to come out and you'll win any Harry Potter quiz that you go to. And if you know it, there's loads of Easter eggs in there.”
“Potted Potter” started in 2005 as a five-minute street show recapping the first five Harry Potter novels to entertain people waiting in line to buy the sixth book. The pair then expanded it into an hour-long show that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the following year and continued to incorporate each book in the series as it was released.
The show first came to San Francisco in 2013 in a run at Marines' Memorial Theatre with another pair
of performers. It previously played the Palace of Fine Arts in 2015, with the creators alternating with another cast. In fact, Hoatson made his “Potted Potter” debut in that last Palace run.
“The San Francisco crowds were brilliant. They were wild,” Hoatson says. “There was another chap that I did the show with, because I think Joe was already in Canada doing the show with someone else. And then we had them both bumped off, and we became the power couple.”
On stage the performers play exaggerated versions of themselves, or at least performer characters with their own names.
“We're on tour a lot, and
there's a lot of time spent just living and eating and going places and doing things, and I think Joe and I become slightly heightened,” Hoatson says. “We are the characters in daily life, and sometimes you forget, where does that end and where do we begin?”
Maudsley agrees. “It's kind of weird, walking around the grocery store and saying hello to everybody like they're at the theater, but they're just trying to do their shopping.”
On stage, Hoatson is ostensibly the serious Potter aficionado who plays Harry and wants to hew as closely to the books as possible, while the fictionalized Maudsley hasn't read the books, plays things fast
and loose, and portrays all the other characters.
“There's one bit during Book 5 where I think I play about 15 different characters in about two minutes, where Scott's putting me through my paces,” Maudsley says. “And how fast he goes depends on how much I've annoyed Scott throughout the show.”
“Joe likes to think he's got the harder job than me, and he really doesn't,” Hoatson says with a laugh. “Just because he puts on a few wigs.”
In reality, both are Harry Potter fans, which is pretty much a prerequisite for the gig.
“We're a similar age, so we grew up with the books,” Maudsley says. “In England
it was part of the national curriculum, like we had to read them.”
In recent years the popular love of all things Harry Potter has become complicated by author Rowling having spent the pandemic years as one of the most prominent voices of anti-transgender backlash in the United Kingdom. But Hoatson says he hasn't seen a difference in how the parody is received.
“We still get people coming and enjoying it, so I haven't noticed in the sense of changing numbers of audience or anything,” he says. “People still come, they still dress up. We still get a whole range of audience in terms of the age bracket and families.”
The fact that an unauthorized parody has been permitted to run for so long and so widely is impressive in itself, considering what a marketable juggernaut the franchise is. But “Potted Potter” isn't competition for official shows such as the play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” that had a long run at SF's Curran Theatre.
“The two chaps that wrote it are genuine fans,” Hoatson says. “Hopefully they know that it's a loving parody of the show rather than satirical criticism.”