The Broadway Theatre Review: Stranger Things: The First Shadow
By Ross
“We are dead in the water,” they cry, as sweeping visual effects envelop the Broadway stage, making the air feel thick and tense with anticipation. It’s a perfect, ferociously framed beginning for the new Broadway play, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, electrifying the space with this Operation Rainbow top-secret aura. Shadows of monsters and tentacles appear in the foggy waters as a huge naval ship, in an attempt to disappear, unlocks and releases this high-tech nightmare into our 1959 world. It’s all encompassing in its threatening formula, delivering just the right type of delicious haunting to satisfy and intoxicate the TV series fanbase that has come together at Broadway’s Marquis Theatre to tune their radio frequency into this well-crafted origin story of the Upside Down, and no one will leave disappointed.
The production, especially in that opening segment, delivers on a promise unspoken, deviously finding its way to capture the essence and tense energy of the television show while drawing us in theatrically. It’s high-tech, old-school theatre magic played out to perfection, like an Upside Down dark version of Harry Potter in reverse, but unlike that theatrical remodeling which takes us forward in the story of that lightning bolt Wizard, Stranger Things: The First Shadow rewinds the cassette tape, drawing us back to that same town but one generation before, and, just to be completely frank, the more you know intrinsically who everyone is, mainly everyone’s familial name, the more excitement you will be gifted by this strange and unusual beast of a show.
Directed with a spirited energy for excitement and dread by Stephen Daldry (Broadway’s The Inheritance), along with playwright Kate Trefry (Netflix’s “Something Bad Is Going to Happen“), based on an original story by the Duffer brothers, Jack Thorne and Trefry, this Stranger Things play (not a musical like everyone keeps asking me) wants us to see something sinisiter in the dark water that is as dangerous and disturbingly threatening as what showed up on that small screen of ours in the television show, and we do, for the most part. Those first few minutes in this 2 hrs 35 min (with one intermission) adventure are completely awe-inspiring and spine chilling, as the visuals, beautifully and captivatingly created by set designer Miriam Buether (Broadway’s Patriots), lighting desginer Jon Clark (Broadway’s A Doll’s House), sound designer Paul Arditti (Bridge’s Guys and Dolls), and the illusions & visual effects team of Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) along with the award-winning 59 studio (Broadway’s Hedwig..), draw us in with the almost overloading of our senses. It’s a treat and the perfect entrance into this formation story, and we are in it completely because of that set-up and the well-formed formula.
But here’s where things don’t go as well as I had hoped. I have a pedestrian awareness of the television show, as I’ve watched with admiration the four seasons presented so far (there is a fifth on its way this year). But the last one in 2022 was just long ago enough for me to not be as tuned in to the details as, well, the very informed older woman sitting next to me in the theatre, who told me, quite giddily, that she binge-watched all of the episodes in the month leading up to this viewing. I’m not sure what compelled her to buy the tickets in the first place, as she hadn’t seen one episode when she purchased her prime Broadway seat, but after she did the deed, she dutifully watched and made notes so that this show made more sense. And it did to her, as she was able to draw the lineage lines from the characters in this stage show to the ones on television. And I must add, her tutelage at intermission made the whole thing a deeper and more interesting experience going forward. It didn’t make it ‘better,‘ I will say, but it did make you feel more in the know and connected to the intricacies of the piece.
Each of the characters that we are quickly introduced to, once that complicated Creel family – the troubled PTSD dad Victor (T.R. Knight), the proper and stressed out mom Virginia (Rosie Benton), the sweet daughter Alice (Poppy Lovell) and their radio-obsessed son, Henry, moves into that creepy house with the attic made perfect for the ‘not weird, but normal‘ teenage Henry, played most powerfully by the show’s young hypnotising star, Louis McCartney (BBC’s “Hope Street“), are connected and apart of the whole “Stranger Things” universe. And as we are quickly shown around that 1959 high school hallway, with each kid being pointed out and described so (hopefully) we connect the ‘twenty-five years before’ dots, the formula and environment come sharply into focus. It’s not the most compelling of introductions, but we hold on to our seats, knowing that this framing, and its connection to that secret failed military experiment, is required for the true beating heart of this haywire other dimension to find its footing inside us.
I should have known who this Henry character represents in the TV series, and although I don’t think it is required to stay tuned in, the knowledge, I believe, adds a layer of intrinsic connection to the whole unfolding. Henry is, most definitely, an odd one, tuned in more to his other world, 50s-model Captain Midnight portable radio that lets him listen in on non-programming, including his parents’ arguments from afar. Costumed purposefully by Brigitte Reiffenstuel (Donmar’s The Fear of 13), he cuts the outsider framing with ease, but we lean into his awkwardness and his disturbance with empathy and care. We feel for this troubled young man who is continually jolted by trauma and electricity whenever he finds himself interrupted by another, and that’s mainly due to McCarthey’s expert and enthusiastic embodiment.
His performance of the central figure is completely impressive and fascinating, especially as we watch his whole body react to the world around him and his mother’s fearful connection to the boy who might have poked out the eyes of another young boy, “accidentally” at the previous school he had attended in the previous town they all lived in. It was in that town where all of this ‘weirdness’ started years ago, after the young Henry went missing in a cave close to a military facility for a few hours on his eighth birthday. And he never was the same again. Things started going bad then, and now, steeped in and drawn out by this play’s mix of horror and hormones, neighborhood pets have started to turn up mutilated and dead, and although we have no idea where this is going (at least I didn’t), we lean in with amazement and wonder, even if the script is a bit slow moving, distracting, and basically plodding.
We feel, in a way, like we are in a demented time warp as classmate Patty Newby (Gabrielle Nevaeh) befriends Henry, sharing their mutual love for comic books and troubled self-consciousness. But the tension and dread are slowly infusing the environment, filled with characters with the same last names as the beloved characters from the television show. Sharing traits and qualities that only a true devotee would instantly connect to, we try to tune into the idea that everyone is a character, in more ways than one, playing nostalgic stereotypes with enthusiastic energy and a strong sense of purpose. Henry struggles, but surprisingly not that disastrously, making inroads at school, even landing the lead role in the school play. Not surprisingly, he is playing the witch-boy who falls in love with a human girl, played by his crush, Patty. How nightmarish could this be?
The parallels are obvious, but in a way, that whole framing seems to slow down the processing and the forward motion of the true cracking opening of this show. We ride it out, knowing that when Henry blindfolds himself in the attic of his home, listening to the static of the radio, that this is where the nightmarish quality of the piece truly lives and breathes its monstrous fire. And we aren’t disappointed by the red-line reframing, as Henry’s other dimensional snapping is graphic and grizzly in its magical visuals and visions. It’s here where we want to be, even as we feel our heart beat faster and our body tense with anticipatory fear. “Boys make mistakes,” we are told, but this is of a different dimension completely.
All the other characters are thrown into the formula with overdone glee, satisfying the parallel universe rewiring with complete determination. This includes a young, rebellious James Hopper, Jr. (Burke Swanson); Patty’s half-brother, the geeky electronic wiz, Bob Newby (Juan Carlos); along with Joyce Maldonado (Alison Jaye), the school play’s overly determined student director, giving all those fans that family tree origin story that make the whole adventure more exciting (for them, but maybe not so much for me). The whole thing starts to implode and explode, as the experiment and Henry find their way to each other, ending the first act on a solid connecting Brenner moment that made more sense when my neighbour reminded me who everyone was.
Brenner, played solidly by Alex Breaux (NYTW’s Red Speedo), who I must say, looks the part more than I realized in the first moment, arrives into town as Henry’s radio connection grows stronger and the deeds that are being committed grow more gruesome and intense. The spider leg scene will live rent-free in your brain for a while, as we watch Henry’s mother disengage and try to escape what is and has happened to her son. We also feel the incoming crawling sense of dread that the arrival of this ‘expert’, Doctor Brenner, brings forward, and we hold onto our seats in wild, nervous anticipation of what will soon follow.
Stranger Things: The First Shadow gets bogged down in the details of this convoluted experimental project that started with what happened to that battleship. And now continues on with Brenner and his colleagues in their white-walled lab. It seems that Brenner knows something about the power of the Upside Down and believes Henry is the key to unlock and harness it, but we know that this is all going to go terribly wrong. That something monstrous will be unleashed that should have stayed away, and we can’t help ourselves to be intrigued and drawn in, even as the plot and dialogue stumble through the hallways of the house in ways that don’t amplify the formula.
I must admit that, as the play moved forward, I wasn’t completely buying into nor fully invested in the Patty and Henry connection, especially with what was happening in the attic and what it could mean to her personally, regardless of how brilliant the magic that swirls around them all truly is. The scenes in the lab tear open the barrier between dimensions in an awe-inspiring manner, with the wriggling mess of pain, anguish, and anger spilling out of Henry and descending magnificently (if not somewhat ridiculously) from the ceiling to great effect. Family dinners crack with anger and fly up into a nightmarish contortion of betrayal and anger that keeps this spectacle moving forward at lightning speed, but the actual personal connection to the central figures starts to lose some semblance of deeper meaning and emotional authenticity, causing me to lean back more than lean in.
The music, compositions, and orchestrations of D.J. Walde (NT’s The Importance of Being Earnest) enhance the unraveling in a spectacular fashion, mixing solidly with the period hit parade of songs and the show’s captivating musical theme by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein. It’s a smoke swirl sensation of the senses, this WWII monster puppet creation, that delivers the sinister scientific contortions in the most epic manner on Broadway. It’s Harry Potter, but turned on its upside-down, dark magic head and forced into the fearful ferociousness of internalized anger and familial betrayal. It’s tense and exciting, with a spellbinding casting of a cutthroat, child-grooming glare that almost blinds us from the meandering plot that only really connects to the diehard fan. McCartney is the magic potion that makes it all work here, giving Stranger Things: The First Shadow its vulnerability and painfully felt empathetic connection. Without him, and without binge-watching the whole series, this new play wows with its trickery, but struggles to fully captivate my conflicted, tense heart.
