“A Very Potter Musical” Wouldn’t Work Today, Says Darren Criss
All of us fell in love with the witches, wizards, and magical beasts of A Very Potter Musical as soon as it hit YouTube back in 2009. The fan-made musical, created by production company StarKid, took on a life of its own, but it’s a life that one of the show’s writers and lead actors, Darren Criss, doesn’t think would have been possible had the show come out today.
Speaking to Popverse at a recent convention, Criss, who plays the boy who lived himself in all three Very Potter musicals, shared his thoughts on the musical. He initially stated that it would be “hard to say” whether the show would’ve taken off now in the same way that it did then.
He believes the show is one of the “many things that happen in culture that [is] completely predicated upon a specific amount of circumstances” and called the show a “lightning in a bottle” moment, explaining the comparison by saying how lightning strikes so quickly in the moment, and the bottle has to be in just the right place to catch it, that the chance of it happening in current times is incredibly low.
The lightning happens so fast that the bottle has to be in a specific place that if it was moved a centimeter to the right, it wouldn’t have gone in the bottle.
Criss finally concluded, “I don’t think there would be any place for something like A Very Potter Musical now, because it would have been conceived different. It wouldn’t have even been considered.”
Back in 2009, the lighting and the bottle were perfect. The show was a viral hit on YouTube and shot Criss to fame, prompting two sequel shows, A Very Potter Sequel and A Very Potter Senior Year.
The company behind the shows, StarKid, may have been only a group of students at the time, but it is now a well-known theater company. All of its shows are still posted to YouTube after their theater runs, and its most recent endeavor saw various cast members from across the years, all of whom were in at least one of the Very Potter musicals, take a concert – It’s StarKid, Innit? – to the London Palladium Theatre in the United Kingdom. The show was the fastest-selling musical concert in the venue’s history, with thousands flocking to see numbers from the company’s singing wizarding world, as well as songs from their other shows.
While the response to StarKid and their musicals hasn’t changed, there is certainly a strong sentiment to what Criss has to say. Do you think A Very Potter Musical would have done as well if released today?
