Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Parts One and Two) 
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby 
LONDON -- Colin Callender's production company Playground, whose credits include Hilary Mantel adaptation "Wolf Hall," has optioned two books, Fiona Barton's psychological thriller "The Widow" and Thomas Grant's nonfiction account of a lawyer's life, "Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories.”The deals follow Playground’s recent optioning of Patrick Kingsley’s "The New Odyssey -- The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis," which will be published in May.“The Widow” is about the wife of a man who is accused -- and eventually cleared -- of kidnapping...
Playground Entertainment
Colin
Callender
Founder / Chairman
Callender originally mounted “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” as a two-night, five-hour-plus stage spectacular in 2018, but when he returned the show to Broadway’s Lyric Theatre in December 2021, the version for post pandemic had been pared down to a still spectacular three and a half hours. That “single play” version has since opened in Melbourne, Toronto and Tokyo, while the original two-parter continued on in Hamburg, Germany, and London’s West End. An Emmy winner for 1982’s “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby,” Callender in 2022 launched new seasons of TV shows he produced: “Dangerous Liaisons” (Starz), starring Lesley Manville and Carice van Houten; Peter Kosminsky’s “The Undeclared War” (Peacock/Channel 4), with Simon Pegg and Mark Rylance; and James Herriot’s “All Creatures Great and Small” (Masterpiece on PBS/Channel 5).
