Three decades after Sabrina Spellman first tried to balance high school with a newly discovered talent for magic, much of the cast of Sabrina the Teenage Witch is getting back together, this time in front of a live audience.
Melissa Joan Hart and several of her former co-stars are launching a 15-stop 30th-anniversary reunion tour featuring stories from the long-running sitcom, recreated scenes, music, bloopers, and behind-the-scenes memories.
The tour announcement was released this week, nearly 30 years after the series debuted in 1996, per People.
For fans who grew up with Sabrina, Salem the sarcastic cat, Aunt Hilda, Aunt Zelda, and the rest of the Spellman household, the tour offers something streaming cannot: seeing members of the original cast revisit the show together in front of an audience.
For many venues, general ticket sales begin Thursday, October 1, at 10 a.m. local time. VIP packages are also available at some stops and include a ticket plus additional perks. Because presale and general-sale timing can vary by city, fans should check the ticketing page for the specific venue they plan to attend.
Sabrina Heads Back On The Road
The live event is titled “Sabrina Cast Reunion: 30 Year Anniversary Live.”
Hart, who starred as Sabrina Spellman, is expected to be joined during the tour by Beth Broderick, who played Aunt Zelda, and Caroline Rhea, who played Aunt Hilda.
Other announced participants include Nate Richert, who played Harvey Kinkle, along with Soleil Moon Frye, Michelle Beaudoin, Jenna Leigh Green, Elisa Donovan, and David Lascher, according to People.
The tour follows a cast reunion held in Chicago in June.
Instead of a traditional convention panel, organizers are promoting a more interactive production.
A Ticketmaster listing says Hart and members of the original cast will act out skits, sing songs, and reminisce over bloopers from the series.
Presales began this week for several dates, with additional presales and general sales continuing through October 1, depending on the venue.
The Tour Starts On Halloween
The first scheduled performance is fittingly planned for Halloween in Beverly, Massachusetts, near Salem.
The tour is expected to make 15 stops across the country, including appearances in Orlando, Detroit, Madison, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Sacramento.
Ticketmaster listings show performances extending into December, including a December 12 show in Sacramento.
Thirty Years Of Sabrina
Sabrina the Teenage Witch premiered in 1996 with Hart playing a teenager who discovers on her 16th birthday that she is a witch.
The premise mixed supernatural storylines with a familiar sitcom formula involving school, dating, family, and growing up.
The series ran until 2003.
Broderick and Rhea became fan favorites as Sabrina’s witch aunts, while Richert’s Harvey served as Sabrina’s longtime boyfriend.
And then there was Salem.
The talking black cat — really a witch sentenced to life as a feline after attempting to take over the world — became one of the show’s most recognizable characters.
Hart told People that fans continue to tell her how much the series meant to them, including viewers who watched the show while learning English or who still turn to it as comfort television.
Broderick also reflected on how long the program has remained part of popular culture.
Why The 1990s Keep Coming Back
The Sabrina reunion arrives amid a broader appetite for entertainment nostalgia built around television, music, movies, and celebrities from the 1980s and 1990s.
Legacy casts increasingly reunite at conventions, on podcasts, in documentaries, and on live stages as audiences revisit the entertainment they grew up with.
North Texas has proven particularly receptive to that nostalgia.
The Dallas Express previously reported that Dallas ranked as the nation’s second-most nostalgic city for millennials in a study examining venues and events tied to the 1980s and 1990s.
The study considered places such as comic bookstores, record stores, vintage clothing retailers, arcades, and roller rinks, along with nostalgia-focused events.
The Sabrina reunion fits squarely into that same appetite.
For many viewers who first watched the show as children or teenagers, the tour is less about discovering Sabrina again than about revisiting a particular era of television.
Sabrina Has Already Been Reintroduced Once
The character has already returned for another generation.
The character has already returned for another generation. Netflix cast Kiernan Shipka as Sabrina Spellman in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a version the company described as a “darker, more macabre” interpretation of the character. The series launched on Netflix on October 26, 2018
The reunion tour, however, is aimed directly at fans of the lighter sitcom starring Hart.
It also arrives at an ideal time of year.
Thirty years after audiences first watched Sabrina discover she was a witch, members of the original cast will begin their anniversary celebration during Halloween season, when witches, black cats, and nostalgia are already in abundance.
Provided by Dallas Express
