‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ Review: On Broadway, a Pure-Horror Scale-Up

In a pivotal scene from the Netflix backstage documentary Behind the Curtain: Stranger Things: The First Shadow, released a week before the Broadway opening of The First Shadow, playwright Kate Trefry breaks some bad news to her collaborators. It’s early in rehearsals for the play’s 2023 West End premiere, and she’s going to have to do a big rewrite, as the Duffer Brothers, creators of Netflix’s Stranger Things, want to save a major plot reveal for the fifth and final season of the series (scheduled for release later this year) and they’ve decided the play gives far too much away. It’s back to work on an umpteenth draft for Trefry.

Therein lies the paradox that may make The First Shadow, no matter how mesmerizing it is to witness, frustrating for fans of the series. The play, a 1950s-set prequel to the sci-fi saga, which is set in the ’80s, tries to deliver enough new content to satisfy audiences eager for the next season, but it can’t unspool meaningful revelations or add so much fresh information as to make this stage spinoff required viewing. (Most of the fandom, of course, won’t get to New York with hundreds of dollars to spare on theater tickets before season five drops.) And Trefry goes out of her way to make the play as accommodating as possible to the uninitiated.

As a result, The First Shadow feels like a dim approximation of what makes the Netflix series so special. But much like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, with which it shares a lead producer (Sonia Friedman), a co-story developer (Jack Thorne), and, perhaps most tellingly, an illusion design team (Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher), we’re not in it for the script.

We’re in it for the jump scares, from a Demogorgon, with the body of a bipedal wolf and the head of a man-eating plant, lunging out of the darkness, to a mirror suddenly shattering. We’re also in it for the scale of the designs, from a monumental ship that splits in two in the chaotic opening scene, to an enormous mind flayer monster that bursts past the fourth wall. And, depending on your tendency toward queasiness, you may or may not be in it for the disturbing scenes of gore, including some pretty brutal telekinetic animal mutilations.

Those are courtesy of Henry Creel (Louis McCartney), a brooding, nerdy high school freshman whose family flees with him to Hawkins, Indiana, after his uncontrollable violent superpower (“superweakness,” he laments) wreaks havoc. Viewers of the series know that Henry will eventually become the demonic Vecna, ruler of the Upside Down and the monsters within, and how this backstory plays out since The First Shadow is ultimately an evening-long adaptation of a flashback sequence from season four. Most of the plot twists will be retrodden territory for Netflix viewers, and as such, when it comes to the story, the play’s fan service lies mostly in the recreation of iconic images from the series and in the supporting cast laying Easter eggs.

Henry’s new classmates include firebrand theater impresario Joyce (Alison Jaye), frustrated hooligan Jim Hopper (Burke Swanson), and lovelorn school radio host Bob Newby (Juan Carlos). When Joyce casts Henry opposite Bob’s sister Patty (Gabrielle Nevaeh), a stranger thing than telekinetic murder skills develops within Henry: a crush.

While Joyce and Hopper share some amusing banter in the spirit of the Netfix series, the dozen or so teenage characters, excepting Henry and the plucky Patty, are all silly caricatures. Stranger Things, though, goes out of its way to dismantle caricaturish first impressions. It understands all the darkness and gore and violence through the lens of a gang of incredibly specific teenage heroes whose humor, camaraderie, and Dungeons & Dragons-inspired joie de vivre make all that bloodiness palatable—and make the series a kid-friendly one. (And in place of the series’s delightful ’80s oeuvre, other than the songs playing on Henry’s beloved, telepathic radio, there’s not a lot of thoughtful evocation of the late ’50s era.)

Without the meta-self-aware winking of a group of kids obsessed with sci-fi stepping into a sci-fi storyline, The First Shadow becomes something that Stranger Things never could be: pure horror. Especially for fans of the series, the choice to focus entirely on Henry, whose future as a serial killer makes it tough to feel too fondly for him or relish his glimpses of happiness, saps The First Shadow of the TV show’s underlying joy.

Not that horror has no place on Broadway. Under Stephen Daldry’s direction, The First Shadow animates the scares with spectacular impact. Miriam Buether’s sets seem to get bigger and bigger as Henry’s power expands. Jon Clark’s lighting and the video design by 59 Productions combine to recreate the signature images of the series, like the Upside Down’s floating gray particles and the watery mirrors of the psychic Void in which Henry carries out his pet attacks. And though Paul Arditti’s sound design can sometimes be abrasive, the buzzes and crackles of electrical current that run through Henry’s body are particularly disturbing and effective.

Most potently, McCartney is terrific and terrifying at detailing Henry’s torment, lurching between the doomed optimism of an outsider seeking affection and the affectless emptiness of a boy possessed by a burgeoning evil. Creepy and eerily charming, McCartney makes Henry movingly pitiable. But that’s not the same thing as sympathetic. And though the play splits hairs about whether it’s the kid who’s evil himself or just the undefined darkness inside him (attributed to Cold War research gone kablooey), it’s hard to root for someone about to wreak irrevocable destruction on our favorite TV characters. The First Shadow can’t offer the “true” story of Vecna like Wicked does for Elphaba, freed from the chains of an ongoing villainous arc. Grown-up Henry Creel still has a lot more harm to cause.

Stranger Things: The First Shadow is now running at the Marquis Theatre.