Critic’s Notebook: ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ Gives the Fanbase What They Want With Audacious Style
There was a time when the only spectacle required to set the theatrical world agog was to have something unexpectedly descend from the rafters. The helicopter in Miss Saigon. The chandelier in The Phantom of the Opera. Whichever actor’s harness snapped in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.
It would be condescending to say that Harry Potter and The Cursed Child “brought” magic to London’s West End. But it set a new bar for a type of ambitious theatricality, burying anything that might otherwise be forgettable about Jack Thorne’s dry play under the equivalent of dozens of chandeliers and helicopters all descending nonstop for seven hours. It’s been a smash on every level, particularly the most important one: Every performance brings an unusually young demographic to the West End (and to Broadway, where the show has been playing since 2018) and they leave generally happy.
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Opening on a stage a mere stone’s throw from the London home of The Cursed Child, Stranger Things: The First Shadow boasts, if possible, an even younger audience than the multiple generations raised on Harry Potter and packing the Palace. And, while I’m comparing exactly one production of The Cursed Child shortly after its 2016 opening to one production of The First Shadow, one week after its formal launch, the enthusiasm seems just as great, if not greater.
Sure, that enthusiasm can be just a little exhausting — the three teenaged girls sitting in front of me at The First Shadow began swapping complex theories five minutes in and didn’t stop for three hours — but I’ve never experienced as instantaneous and enthusiastic a standing ovation as the one that concluded the show.
Let’s leave aside that exactly none of the people most deserving of that standing ovation were there to accept the curtain call (once a week the crew should get to come out for a bow). We’re at the point in The First Shadow‘s run at which the audience is aggressively in-the-bag for all things Stranger Things and in my unscientific view, they’re pleased.
For my purposes, and perhaps your purposes, dear not-necessarily-London-adjacent readers, there are two questions: Is Stranger Things: The First Shadow actually a good play? And what, if anything, does it have to do with Stranger Things as a TV show?
Written by Kate Trefry, with contributions by the Duffer Brothers and, yes, Jack Thorne, Stranger Things: The First Shadow is definitely good spectacle and I’m not so snobby as to think there isn’t virtue in that alone. The play is directed by Stephen Daldry, with Justin Martin credited as co-director (and the Duffers as “Creative Producers”). I don’t know if it’s as seamless and astonishing a transposition of the blockbuster aesthetic as Cursed Child, but it’s in many ways an even more impressive piece of interdisciplinary theater.
Actually, it definitely isn’t seamless. It’s a chaotic collage of a show, with traditional theatrical effects — mood-enhancing lighting, gravity-defying wire work, nook-and-cranny-packing sound design, etc. — abutting new-fangled video production techniques, with filmed segments and simulated drone shots. There are smoke effects, bursting flashbulbs and some of the most impressive and varied usages of the physical stage I’ve ever seen. There’s spectacular vertical and horizontal depth to the playing space, which shuffles characters and individual sets around with a spinning center.
It’s busy, but in a highly intentional way. To orchestrate stage magic like this, you need sleight of hand and there’s nothing “slight” about this. Your eyes are constantly being pulled to two or three corners of the stage at once and the jump-scares are relentless and, it would appear, effective. The teens in front of me only paused their speculating to shriek and while I’m singling them out, they were far from the only ones.
This is a show which, outside of a traditional narrative context, could only make sense coming after four full seasons of Stranger Things. Its general aura of excess would have felt peculiar coming off of the quaint, nostalgia-fueled first season, when episodes were mostly under 50 minutes and the special effects were used sparingly. But following a fourth season in which episodes sometimes ran over two hours and the effects were fully immersive, this three-hour show seems right. It’s ridiculous, of course, but Stranger Things has become ridiculous.
On that level, it works. The show starts with a full-on World War II flashback, complete with a crashing battleship and some number of creepy-crawly creatures. It’s such a wildly outlandish opening — something about the Philadelphia Experiment and the USS Eldridge, but don’t bother trying to figure out how or why, at least for now — that when the title treatment drops and the Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein theme music plays, it’s cathartic for the audience to unwind by whooping. Whooping at Stranger Things: The First Shadow isn’t just allowed, it’s encouraged.
Trefry’s script, which could be boiled down to a Muppet Babies version of the adult Stranger Things cast or a Young Sheldon-ian origin story for the nefarious Vecna, is a carefully constructed whooping machine. There are the younger versions of the characters we know from TV, including Winona Ryder’s Joyce (Isabella Pappas), Sean Astin’s Bob Newby (Chris Buckley) and David Harbour’s Hopper (Oscar Lloyd) and nearly every character has a last name designed to make you go, “Wait, Wheeler? Like that Wheeler?” or “Wait, Beyers, like that Byers?” The loneliest feeling in the world must be somebody stumbling into The First Shadow as a total neophyte and wondering why everything seems to be an in-joke.
Most of the actors and references are just sleight-of-hand as well, since at its heart, The First Shadow is a story of a special kid (Louis McCartney’s Henry Creel) coming to terms with his special powers and facing the tragic point at which those powers could lead to good or to evil. It’s Carrie or, well, The Cursed Child, and yes, it’s season four of Stranger Things, since we already saw the story of how Henry Creel became Vecna and this is that. Again.
It’s structurally unwieldy, spending an astounding amount of time on a high school production of Howard Richardson and William Berney’s real-life allegorical curio Dark of the Moon. If there weren’t so much of Dark of the Moon woven into The First Shadow, you’d say that Trefry was using it as shorthand, but nothing in Stranger Things is done in shorthand anymore. Every plot point or thematic grace note has to be written out in triplicate and I’m still doubtful that anybody attending The First Shadow will have a clue what to make of the Dark of the Moon material.
It turns out that, in the fourth season of Stranger Things, when Henry Creel (Jamie Campbell Bower) expresses his contempt for humanity by saying, “Everyone is just waiting, waiting for it all to be over, all while performing in a silly, terrible play, day after day,” maybe he wasn’t being figurative and that play was Dark of the Moon. There may be a meta play to be written about Dark of the Moon and its odd and marginal significance, something in the vein of Paula Vogel’s Indecent or Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock. This isn’t that.
I also don’t know what anybody will make of the 1959 setting. The TV series, when it began, was a pastiche of all of the things that the Duffer Brothers loved from growing up in the 1980s, starting with Stephen King and Steven Spielberg. Every line of dialogue and piece of cultural texture felt authentic and purposeful. I doubt anybody working on The First Shadow feels comparable nostalgia for anything related to the 1950s. It’s just a time period, one that is reflected in the costumes and hair, but not in the dialogue or the overall milieu. Any brief acknowledgment of cultural conformity or post-McCarthy Era paranoia is another thing to be upstaged by flash and sizzle.
Unfortunately, the performances are similarly lost in the spectacle, or maybe that’s for the best, since I think the more you ponder how the characters onstage connect with the characters on your TV, the less it works.
McCartney, whose characterization is built heavily on a very physical manifestation of demonic possession, makes Henry sympathetic and likably doomed, but if you stop and ponder for a second whether he resembles the Henry whose backstory we saw unfold in “The Massacre at Hawkins Lab,” your head will hurt. McCartney’s Henry is at his best when he’s sharing scenes with Ella Karuna Williams’ Patty Newby, adopted sister of Bob, whose character hasn’t been part of the TV show and therefore isn’t beholden to anything from it. Is Patty somehow a key piece of season five? That would be weird.
You can try watching the character-driven scenes to see if we’re getting origin stories for any personality traits that will later matter in Joyce, Hopper, Bob and even Matthew Modine’s Brenner (Patrick Vaill). But the answer consistently is, “Not so much that it could possibly matter.”
Hopper is presented as a bumbling teenage detective trapped in the shadow — shadows EVERYWHERE — of his sheriff father. So that means what we get out of this glimpse into his past is “daddy issues.” Did Joyce learning to “do anything to protect the ones she loves” actually require an origin story? Apparently! And does knowing in slightly more explicit detail how Brenner attempted to reproduce Henry’s gifts on his various experimental patients change anything for the series heading into its endgame? I doubt it?
Based on the things we learn from The First Shadow, it feels like everybody in Hawkins should have greeted the events of the TV show with a deja vu that definitely doesn’t track, something along the lines of, “Oh. Are we doing this crap again?” Or “It’s 1959 all over again!” But that, like the odd reduction of diversity in Hawkins, Indiana, between 1959 and the early 1980s probably won’t benefit from the head-scratching. Realigning the Henry/Vecna we met in season four with the Henry/Vecna introduced in the play would require an elaborate and pointless ret-con. That puts The First Shadow in the weird position of being a theatrical event designed to be a standalone story even though it doesn’t stand alone at all.
I’m not the least bit cynical about a pocket of the West End, and soon to be a pocket of Broadway, being dedicated to these exercises in blockbuster theater. Much moreso than, for example, the pockets of Theaterland set aside for crappy jukebox musicals, these shows are good for the overall business. But more than that, they’re good for the craftspeople who are the life’s blood of the industry. The number of people trained on The Cursed Child and now The First Shadow to think that theater presents no limitations to the most imaginative of creative storytellers can only be beneficial.
So is Stranger Things: The First Shadow good? Maybe not on some levels, but overall? It raises the ante on giving a fanbase what they want in an audacious style. And is Stranger Things: The First Shadow going to be essential viewing to make sense of the upcoming final season? I would hope not, but who knows?
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