Yes, the Poor Dear Flunked Out of Hogwarts

NEW YORK — By last count, more than 180 million copies of J.K. Rowling’s seven Harry Potter novels have been sold in the United States. Not a single one was bought by me.

I tried to watch the first film, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” and gave up midway — too much “Goonies"-with-magic for my taste. That was the beginning and the end of me and the Potter movies.

Yet it was with great excitement that I made my way to Jack Thorne’s “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a new Broadway extravaganza based on a story hatched by Rowling, Thorne and the show’s ingenious director, John Tiffany. After all, I love both whiz-bang theatricality and fantasy — my young-adult series of choice is Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials,” itself the subject of a 2004 London stage adaptation that, alas, did not cross the Atlantic. Plus, “Cursed Child” is set about 20 years after the last book and focuses on Harry’s son, Albus, so as a newbie, I felt I could have a fresh start.

As it turned out, I spent a lot of the show bored. “Cursed Child” is a clunky play that could not reverse my indifference to the Potterverse.

There is no denying that the visual effects in this two-part British import are spectacular, but they only add up to maybe 30 minutes, tops, of a six-hour running time. The rest is spent on a feeble, repetitive story (it’s never clear why it’s so important for the young Albus and his friend Scorpius Malfoy to undertake their time-travel project, for instance) padded with dopey teenage angst and banal father-son issues. The dialogue is as brain-numbing as the stagecraft is eye-popping.

I am not sure that having read thousands of pages, or watched hours and hours of films beforehand, would have helped.

Besides, I did not step into the Lyric Theater entirely free of Potter knowledge, which at this point would be impossible for any half-sentient being with a personal and professional interest in pop culture. Let’s just say Harry and I had gone to first base. I knew enough of the basics, like what Hogwarts and Muggles are, that Severus Snape had long been a double agent of sorts, and that Lord Voldemort is the noseless embodiment of evil and must be defeated at all cost, or else. Even a reference to Bellatrix Lestrange did not fall on deaf ears because somehow I was aware that Helena Bonham Carter played her on screen.

But scraps of information are not enough at “Cursed Child,” even supplemented by the Playbill’s meaty summary of the tale so far.

I may have heard of Bellatrix, for instance, but I did not know exactly who she was. Turned out, she is the subject of a reveal that feels huge, yet is nothing more than an Easter egg meant to induce knowing gasps in the audience. Same for Neville Longbottom, and who’s that girl in the bathroom again?

Coincidentally, a few days after “Cursed Child” I saw another play that relies heavily on background information. This was the revival of Tom Stoppard’s 1974 “Travesties”; I was marginally better equipped for it, and even then I only caught, at best, two-thirds of the allusions — to Lenin, James Joyce, “The Importance of Being Earnest” and the Dada founder Tristan Tzara, not to mention the real-life (though obscure) British Consulate employee at the center of the proceedings.

There are so many references that the show feels as if it was written by dragging a fishing trawl through a library. Like “Cursed Child,” it rewards the bookish connoisseur of arcana; unlike the witless “Cursed Child,” however, “Travesties” has a verve and humor that stand on their own, and a truly delicious lead performance by Tom Hollander. (Full disclosure: I also very much enjoyed Noma Dumezweni’s Hermione Granger in “Cursed Child.”)

There’s one other new Broadway show that requires a good bit of background knowledge, but it’s the easiest to embrace cold. “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical” works even if, like me, you go in not knowing that pink-clad Patrick is meant to be a starfish. Maybe I was feeling like the “Angels in America” audience member who had a great time at the show I attended, despite, as I overheard, that she was unaware that Roy Cohn had really existed.

But then “Cursed Child,” unlike “Travesties” and “SpongeBob,” is not a true stand-alone. It is specifically designed to complement a canonical heptalogy, and thus it functions essentially — possibly only — as both a piece of a larger puzzle and a trigger for hoots of recognition. Hence that Bellatrix Lestrange bit.

The producers of “Cursed Child” have a built-in audience of fans big enough to last them many years, which they will need if they are to recoup their enormous investment. Clearly they don’t need the likes of me. In a way I’m the one who needed them, and for their show to be good. Because Broadway can always use creators with ambition and imagination, and on paper at least, “Cursed Child” has them.

And if Broadway has room for only one mega-show, “Cursed Child” may ensure we never get a play of Marvel’s Avengers. For that alone, I am grateful.