INTERVIEW: ‘Puffs’ has magical journey to off-Broadway’s New World Stages

Puffs, the successful and loving comedy inspired by the Harry Potter series, has traveled quite the magical journey to its current home at New World Stages in Midtown Manhattan. What started a couple of years ago as a brief five-performance run has blossomed into an off-Broadway success story that is bringing fanboys and fangirls together over their shared love of Hogwarts and live theater.

The secondary title of Puffs offers a glimpse of what audience members can expect at the play: Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic & Magic. Forget about Harry, Ron and Hermione for a second, and meet a new trio of “loyal rejects” who struggle through their time at magic school. They call themselves the Puffs, and they are generating laughs on a nightly basis.

“Back a few years ago, my business partner, John [Arthur] Pinckard, saw a show down at the People’s Improv Theater, the PIT, called Kapow-i GoGo that was put together by Matt Cox, our writer for Puffs, and Kristen [McCarthy] Parker, our director, and also Stephen Stout, who is one of our associate producers, and he’s also in the show, and Colin Waitt, who is also one of our executive producers,” Carpenter said in a recent phone interview. “He was really entranced by their work. Kapow-i was a five-and-a-half hour-long comic-book-character, video-game-character journey. It was a brilliant piece but not commercially viable in New York, and he was like, gosh, these guys are really talented. And he went up to them afterward and said, ‘Hey, keep me in mind for the next thing.'”

The next thing that the team put together was Puffs. They started working on the play approximately two years ago, and in December of 2015, they launched the show at the PIT. It was only supposed to run for five performances.

Pinckard, sticking to his promise, went to see the show during the last two weeks of the year at the height of the Christmas season. He then called Carpenter, who was enjoying a nice break in Westchester away from the hubbub of the New York City theater scene.

“He said, ‘You’ve got to get on a train and come down and see this thing,’” Carpenter said. “I was like, ‘It’s Christmas.’ I’m like, ‘Really?’ He’s like, ‘No you have to come down and see this thing.’ And so I did actually at the top of the year right after New Year’s. I had read all the Harry Potter books, and my business partner is a huge Harry Potter fan. I read everything, and I was like, there’s something happening here. It’s kind of an amazing thing that I’m watching right now because it’s a play that takes place in a world that is amazingly familiar to a world that we know, but it’s not. This is ultimate fan fiction. It’s a true comedy with a heart. It’s not a parody. It’s not any of those things. This is a really good play.”

The producing team immediately optioned the play, and Pinckard and Carpenter found themselves as two young producers sitting on an 11-character show that seemed viable for a commercial run off-Broadway. It took approximately four or five months for them to figure out the next step.

The producing team decided to take the show out of town — even out of state.

“We took it to the University of Florida, where we have a relationship,” Carpenter said. “We’ve done three workshops with them now, every May and June, and we take our creative team down. And we set a show with the students and develop it down there. University of Florida provides an enormous amount of resources, so by the time we were getting into April-May of last year, we knew that the destination that we wanted this to be was to go to the Elektra. In order to produce this thing viably for commercially off-Broadway, we cut a deal with the Elektra that we weren’t doing a full eight performances a week. We’re starting at three, and then moving to four and then moving to five over time. We were keeping it really, really cost-conscious about what we were spending.”

The Elektra Theatre has one of the best locations for an off-Broadway house. It’s literally housed among Broadway theaters on 43rd Street, so there’s a lot of foot traffic that passes its front door.

After the producing team returned from Florida, they spent the summer raising more funds and eventually moved into the Elektra. Puffs officially opened at the end of September.

“Immediately, we knew just out of the gate from the first performance that we captured something that the market was really looking for, certainly within this particular fandom,” said Carpenter, who grew up in Atlanta seeing shows at the Alliance Theatre. “We spent October and November just building our audience brick by brick, just every weekend building, and building and building, and then by the time we hit December of ’16, the show was just like regular selling out. We were doing sell-out performances for four months.”

A renovation of the Elektra in 2017 caused the show to think about its next step. Carpenter had an “Oh my God” moment because he knew the show was still viable, but finding a new home was difficult.

“We started looking for new venues, and I called Michael Coco, who I’ve known for many years, who runs New World Stages with the Shuberts,” Carpenter said. “I said, ‘Just come check it out. I don’t know if I can afford your theater.’ They came and saw the show, and he’s like, ‘If you guys are interested, I think I have a theater available for you.’ And so we took our creative team over there, and the minute we walked in, we were like, yeah, this is what needs to happen. This is where we need to go. We then spent May and June working on the transfer.”

They shuttered the show at the Elektra July 2 and reopened for previews at New World Stages July 8, skipping over the traditionally slow time of the July 4 holiday. “We opened July 17 at New World Stages, and we’ve been doing extraordinarily well ever since,” Carpenter said. “It’s been kind of an amazing journey.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Puffs, written by Matt Cox, is currently playing New York City’s New World Stages. Click here for more information and tickets.