WIZARDING WHIMSY Parody duo sums up 7 Harry Potter books in 70 minutes

Jefferson Turner (left) as Harry Potter with Daniel Clarkson in "Potted Potter."

Updated: November 21, 2012 11:30AM

Full disclosure: I am among the very few people on the planet who somehow have neglected to read any of J.K. Rowling’s seven Harry Potter books or see any of the eight movies that are based on them.

But even a turtle who has slept under a rock since 1997 — when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published — knows something about the orphaned boy wizard who lives among the non-magical Muggles, whose parents were killed by the evil Lord Voldemort, who attends the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and whose friends include the fun-loving Ronald Weasley and the studious Hermione Granger.

So the idea of receiving the theatrical equivalent of a 70-minute speed-reading course in all things Harry Potter has its appeal. And it can now be had in the form of “Potted Potter: The Unauthorized Harry Experience — A Parody by Dan and Jeff,” the rapid-fire show at Broadway Playhouse at Chicago’s Water Tower Place.

Written and performed by two former BBC children’s television hosts — Daniel Clarkson (who plays all the characters but Harry) and Jefferson Turner (as the bespectacled wizard boy) — “Potted Potter” is a zany condensation of all seven of Rowling’s books, carried out with the help of multiple costume changes, a slew of songs and a hint of Hogwarts magic.

Clarkson was a working actor of 20 when he had his first encounter with Harry — reading the initial Potter book to his younger brother, then 10, as a bedtime story.

“I would just keep reading aloud even after he’d fallen asleep,” he said.

Turner confesses he hadn’t read any of the Potter books until his encounter with Clarkson.

“But then I read five in a week and a half, and fell instantly in love with them.”

It all started in 2005 when Clarkson was approached to create some sort of event for the midnight launch of the sixth book in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

“There were two competing bookstores on London’s Oxford Street at the time — a Borders and a Waterstones — and it was the [now defunct] Borders that asked me to come up with an idea. So I thought: ‘Condense the first five books into five minutes.’ ”

Clarkson also had the good luck to find Turner, who was busking in the Covent Garden area at the time.

As Turner recalled: “I was attracting the attention of about five or six Japanese tourists when this tall man with a wide grin appeared. He said he liked what I was doing and asked me to go for a drink.”

Clarkson expected 50-100 people at the store. “But there were a thousand,” he said, “and then we repeated it several times and had an amazing turnout.”

The rest is history, including a run of the ramped-up show in London’s West End that earned them an Olivier Award nomination, an Off Broadway run, and now a U.S. tour.

Asked why they thought Harry Potter had become such a global phenomenon, Turner observed: “I think it is his true Britishness, especially in the U.S. and Canada, where British things seem to be in vogue. Also, while neither of us went to a boarding school [‘My mom and dad loved me,’ Clarkson chimed in], it is very much a British tradition.”~.

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