By Ashleigh Heaton
Entertainment Editor

Ron, Hermione, and…a tap-dancing Voldemort?  This is only the beginning when it comes to “A Very Potter Musical”, the latest performance to rock YouTube and the Harry Potter fanbase.

Split up into two acts over the course of 23 YouTube videos, the comical musical parody of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series focuses on key points from throughout the series, most heavily on the plots of the first, fourth and seventh books. The main draw of the musical is for fans of the series knowledgeable of the magical world of Hogwarts and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, though fair-weather fans can still find it entertaining. Most of the jokes are college-humor related, grounding the far-fetched story in modern times and amplifying the quirks of Rowling’s characters.

“It takes these books which really are dark at times [with] more adult themes as they progress and really just makes something silly and humorous out of the whole thing,” junior Caroline Lowry said. “It’s like the ultimate Harry Potter parody, exaggerating features of the real characters and plot.”

Most of the humorous portions of the show are presented in the first act, which has a more care-free atmosphere with musical fanfares and antics such as “Different As Can Be” and the opening number “Get Back to Hogwarts”, as well as Harry “slaying” a dragon through some soulful guitar jamming in “Hey Dragon”. The second act focuses on the darker plot points of the series and relinquishes some of its comedy to sentimentalism in the numbers “Missing You” and “Not Alone”.

“The jokes are so funny because the books are so familiar [to fans],” junior Mandy Mullarkey said. “It’s what you joke about in your head when reading the books, brought to life in a musical.”

The show was created and produced solely by Team Starkid, an unofficial group of college students from the University of Michigan. The group was founded after they won a college film contest and given $20,000 from the Walt Disney Company to create a web series. This lead to Little White Lie, a season of web shows focusing on a struggling band’s stroke of good luck. “A Very Potter Musical” became a side-project for a few people from the cast and crew, with brothers Matt and Nick Lang directing and writing the script along with Brian Holden. Original music for the show was composed by Darren Criss (Harry Potter) and AJ Holmes, who also made contributions to the Little White Lie project. Within three weeks, the crew had a finished product and performed the show five times for free on their campus while also capturing it on video.

Most viewers will have a hard time believing the cast is made of unprofessional actors because of the authentic talent and ingenuity they bring to the table.  Most notable are Joe Walker and Lauren Lopez, who play Voldemort and Draco Malfoy, respectively. Walker’s Voldemort is insane, evil and a stickler about putting away dirty laundry; Lopez, in contrast, takes on the infamous job of cross-dressing to play a boy while developing a whiny, clueless version of Malfoy. Though the rest of the cast creates excellent caricatures of their characters, Walker and Lopez stand out because of the unexpected dynamics they add to their parts.

“I think that the big fan favorite is definitely Lauren Lopez as Malfoy,” Lowry said. “She’s probably the most loved because she’s a girl who’s portraying the sort of iconic, attractive figure in Harry Potter who’s gained this image of a hardcore yet internally broken heart-throb. She takes this extremely snotty and bratty character and blows him up to new extremes.”

The performance on YouTube is not the original, however. Initially, Team Starkid posted the show, in its entirety, in April 2009 under the name of “Harry Potter: The Musical” with little expectations concerning the show’s popularity. However, once it began to receive more attention than anticipated, the group took down the show in late June and censored out a few racy jokes and words that were deemed not appropriate for everyone on the internet.

“The [censored] jokes really weren’t all that bad, I thought,” Mullarkey said. “But I guess some people are just easily offended.”

After reposting the censored version under the name of “A Very Potter Musical” on July 5, the show’s fanbase continued to grow at alarming rates. As of Oct. 20, the first video of the show had 675,529 views – just above three months after the re-release – and that number continues to grow.

And why shouldn’t it? To quote the opening song, “A Very Potter Musical” is “totally awesome”.