At twelve-forty this afternoon, sitting in the house of the Lyric Theatre with Fitz beside me, I sent a message to Emmet’s parents: Fitz and I are in the theater to watch Emmet perform at the 1 PM show. I texted them, not Emmet — you don’t message a performer twenty minutes before curtain.

Emmet Smith is Fitz’s second cousin, on his mother’s side. He is also Albus Potter in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway — a role he stepped into last November for his Broadway debut. Today was our first chance to see him in it.

I have known Emmet since he was about eight. I became part of the family in 2008, and he was one of the first people I met on Fitz’s mother’s side — a kid from Washington Heights with a big personality and an even bigger smile. That kid is now on a billboard in Times Square.

Six minutes after my text to his parents, Emmet wrote to me directly.

Rajiv! This is Emmet — my mom tells me you’re at the matinee! Can I say hi after?

I wrote back: We would love to.

What happened next was Emmet being Emmet. Within minutes — minutes before his own curtain — he had our names on the stage door list, texted directions to the entrance on 43rd Street (the west side, he specified, near Broadway, to get past the crowd), and arranged for security to let us through as his guests. He would come get us himself.

The Show

Above the entrance to the Lyric Theatre, a line from the Harry Potter world is etched into the marquee: Those that we love never truly leave us. It felt right walking in under those words with Fitz.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child earns its reputation. The staging is inventive in ways I will not spoil, the ensemble is tight, and the story — about a father and son trying to understand each other across the weight of legacy — lands harder than you might expect.

Emmet plays Albus Potter, Harry’s second son, the one who doesn’t fit the heroic mold his family built. It is a demanding role. Albus has to carry the audience’s sympathy while making choices that are, by turns, reckless and heartrending. He is on stage for nearly the entire show.

Emmet is twenty-six and playing a teenager. On stage, he is entirely convincing as a boy navigating adolescence — the restlessness, the defiance, the need to be seen as something other than his father’s son. His Albus was warm without being soft, defiant without being bratty. In the scenes with his stage father, the tension between love and disappointment reads as real. In the scenes with Scorpius, his best friend, there is an ease and humor that gives the show its beating heart.

Fitz watched the whole thing leaning forward. He knows what it takes to stand on a stage — he has done it himself, in shows where his own abilities surprised people who had no idea whose kid he was. But watching his cousin do it on Broadway, in a production built around stories he grew up reading, was something else entirely.

Through the Stage Door

After the final bow, we followed Emmet’s instructions. Out the front of the theater, around to 43rd Street, through the crowd gathered at the stage door. Names on the list. Security waved us into a small vestibule, and we waited.

A few minutes later, Emmet appeared — still carrying the energy of a show just finished — and walked us back through the corridors of the Lyric Theatre.

When I saw him up close, I told him it felt like he had magically slowed down his aging. The last time I had seen him in person, he was still a teenager himself. Now he is twenty-six, performing on Broadway, and somehow looks like he could still pass for the high schooler he plays eight times a week. Whatever spell he is using, it is working.

He showed us the backstage world: the costume racks, the quick-change stations, the spaces where the show’s illusions are assembled and disassembled twice a day, eight times a week. He did all of this between shows, in the narrow window between the matinee and the evening performance. His mom texted us later: He snuck you in between shows! That is special treatment!

She was right. That window is an actor’s time to rest, eat, reset. Emmet spent his showing a fourteen-year-old around backstage.

Then Emmet took us into his dressing room — his name on the door, Playbills on the wall, the small personal space where he becomes Albus Potter twice a day. He introduced Fitz and me to two of his friends who are also in the show. And then he did something I don’t think Fitz will forget.

He gave Fitz a Hog-meade Parental Consent Form.

If you know the Harry Potter world, you know what this is: the permission slip students need signed before they can visit the village of Hogsmeade. It is a piece of the show’s world, made real. And Emmet had filled it out with Fitz’s name and written him a personal note on the back, signed and dated today.

Fitz held it the way you hold something you know you will keep.

Before we left, I set up a group chat between the two of them so they could stay in touch directly — cousin to cousin, without parents relaying messages in between.

What Stays

Last December, I wrote about watching Fitz perform in a show in Connecticut and reading a stranger’s professional review of his acting. That piece was about the experience of seeing your kid through someone else’s unbiased eyes — confirmation that the talent you thought you saw was real.

Today the current ran the other way. Fitz was the one in the audience, watching someone from his own family do the thing they both love, on the biggest stage there is.

I keep thinking about what Emmet did today. Not just the performance, which was excellent. The rest of it. The text within minutes of learning we were there. The names on the stage door list. The backstage tour carved from his own rest time between shows. The personalized consent form placed in a younger cousin’s hands — a piece of the wizarding world, made out to Fitz by name.

I watched a kid from Washington Heights grow into a young man standing on a Broadway stage. And today I watched him step off that stage, between performances, to make his younger cousin feel like the most important person in the building.

That kind of generosity is not something you learn. It is who someone is.

Emmet texted us after we left: So good to see you! Tell Fitz I say thanks for coming. Love you guys.

Fitz will remember this day. Not because it was Broadway, though Broadway matters. Not because of the theatrical magic on stage, though it was real. He will remember it because his cousin — performing in that building, between those two shows — made room for him.

That is the kind of magic that doesn’t require a permission slip.