Joanne Kathleen Rowling looked slightly tense. She had just completed a television segment, alongside her collaborators on “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the eighth — and the only theatrical — installment in her celebrated wizarding saga, which begins previews on March 16 at the Lyric Theater on Broadway. Now she had another interview to do.

Rowling is famously private. And crazily famous. Her Harry Potter novels have sold over 450 million copies since the first was published in 1997, spawning an empire that now encompasses movies, the spinoff “Fantastic Beasts” films, Harry Potter Wizarding World theme parks, and detective novels (written under a pseudonym) that have been made into a television series.

喬安．凱瑟琳．羅琳看來略顯緊張。她和「哈利波特與被詛咒的孩子」的合作夥伴，剛剛結束了電視訪問。此刻她又要接受另一個採訪。該舞台劇是她著名的巫師傳奇的第八部，也是唯一一部劇場作品，3月16日開始在百老匯吟唱劇場展開預演。

羅琳女士出了名的不喜歡曝光。而她也出名到爆。她的哈利波特系列小說自1997年首部發行以來，已在全球銷售逾4億5000萬冊，且已發展成為一個帝國，如今涵蓋電影、外傳「野獸」電影、哈利波特魔法世界主題公園，以及被製作成電視連續劇的偵探小說（以化名書寫）。

Like much else she touches, her first theatrical venture has been a smash. It earned rave reviews and sold-out houses in London, going on to win in a record-breaking nine categories at last year’s Olivier Awards, the British equivalent of the Tonys.

And yet Rowling, who started out as a struggling single mother, writing her first Harry Potter novel in Edinburgh cafes, seemed — despite an armor of smart wrap dress and high heels — determined to take absolutely nothing for granted.

就像她碰觸到的許多其他東西一樣，她的第一個舞台劇嘗試也一砲而紅。在倫敦贏得如潮好評，門票銷售一空，接著並在去年有英國東尼獎之稱的（勞倫斯）奧利佛獎，創紀錄拿下9項大獎。

當初只是位經濟拮据單親媽媽，在愛丁堡的咖啡館完成她的第一本哈利波特小說的羅琳女士，儘管披掛整齊，足登高跟鞋，身穿漂亮的Ｖ領束腰連身裙，但她仍決心全力以赴，絕不將任何事情視為理所當然。

“We see this as a new challenge,” she said, looking at John Tiffany, the show’s cheerful director, and Jack Thorne, its tall and gangly writer, who were seated with her backstage at the Palace Theater in the West End here. “Broadway is a scary place.”

Broadway is a scary place, with new productions — even those based on beloved titles — routinely failing to live up to their producers’ hopes and dreams. And “Cursed Child” confronts challenges in New York that it didn’t face when it opened here in July 2016 amid more mystery, excitement and anticipation than attends most presidential elections. (And what felt like just about as much media coverage.)

她說：「我們認為這是一個新的挑戰。」說時望向這部舞台劇興高采烈的導演約翰．蒂芬尼和高瘦的作家傑克．索恩，兩人和她一起坐在倫敦西區此間皇宮劇院的後台。「百老匯是個可怕的地方。」

百老匯確是個可怕的地方，一些新的製作，即使是以深受喜愛作品為基礎的產品，往往仍無法符合製作人的期望和夢想。「被詛咒的孩子」在紐約面對的，是該劇2016年7月在此間搬上舞台時並未曾遭遇的挑戰， 當時伴隨該劇的神秘感、興奮感和期待都高於大多數總統選舉。 （感覺獲得的媒體報導也一樣多）。

Secrecy about the story line, collectively developed by Rowling, Thorne and Tiffany, fed a growing obsession with what the play would reveal about Harry and Company, and a #keepthesecret campaign encouraged a clublike camaraderie among the preview audiences.

But now that script has been published, reviews have been written and tweets have been tweeted, the plot — a coming-of-age trajectory for Harry’s second son, Albus — is out there. (According to Scholastic, the Potter publisher, the book version of “Cursed Child” has sold over 5 million copies in the United States.)

Unlike most family-oriented Broadway offerings, “Cursed Child” is a play, not a musical, and it will compete in the spring with Disney’s musical adaptation of the animated blockbuster “Frozen.”

羅琳女士，索恩和蒂芬尼對聯手打造的故事情節保密到家，讓人們越來越關注這部戲會透露有關哈利和夥伴們的什麼事，而一場#保密活動，也在預覽觀眾中鼓舞了一種類似粉絲團的友誼。

不過，如今腳本已公諸於世，評論也已出爐，推文也已被發送，至於情節，哈利的二兒子阿不斯的成熟軌跡，已攤開在那裡。 （根據哈利波特出版商學者出版集團，「被詛咒的孩子」的印刷版已在美國銷售逾500萬本。）

與大多數以家庭為導向的百老匯產品不同，「被詛咒的孩子」是一部舞台劇，不是音樂劇，它將在春季與迪士尼動畫巨片「冰雪奇緣」改編的音樂劇一較高下。

文／Roslyn Sulcas　譯／王麗娟

Source article: https://udn.com/news/story/11320/3023975