What is Stranger Things: The First Shadow? This was not a question that bedeviled my 10-year-old son, happy as he was to be headed to Broadway and enfolded in the comfort of familiar IP. “I love Stranger Things,” William said.
But I was apprehensive. Stranger Things: The First Shadow, which opened at the Marquis Theatre in New York last week, after a successful run in London’s West End, is not a musical (thank God), but rather a play—not that you’ll spot that quaint word in many of the promotional materials. Nor does “play” adequately capture the ambitions of this production, which fairly earns one of those airy terms used by television marketers. A Broadway event? A Broadway…spectacular?
It’s a nearly three-hour act of fan service, filling in the origin story of Henry Creel, a misfit boy who becomes one of the Netflix series’s big, bad monsters (Vecna, in Season 3, per William). Henry will find his way to a sinister government lab by the end of the stage production, and, if you ask me, that’s where The First Shadow seems to have been born: It’s a play cross-bred with a roller-coaster, and maybe a haunted house.
I liked it. It is crisply directed (by Stephen Daldry), imaginatively staged, and well acted. I particularly liked the first hour, which was busy and headlong and had several unnerving, slightly assaultive sequences of sound and visual effects. By the end, I, a Stranger Things neophyte, felt sidelined by the lore, the world building, the inside jokes—but the shocks had had their effect: I was dizzy with ingeniously conjured spiders, snapped limbs, a disinterred dead cat, and a host of levitating actors. A giant ghoulishly tentacled puppet called…checks notes…The Mind Flayer had descended from the rafters to menace me. At the curtain call, I rose to my feet.
But, to be fair, my critic’s brain was firmly switched off. Those duties I had ceded to my son, William, who has binged the episodes and can explain what a Demogorgon is, how the gate works, and what happens in the Upside Down. I’d actually formalized this arrangement. Once upon a time, I turned my daughter Vivian into a Vogue.com Taylor Swift critic. Now it was William’s turn to rigorously evaluate Stranger Things.
“I love this!” he exclaimed, after a rather thrilling prologue that involves a navy battleship crashing into another dimension and being set upon by monsters. Lest you think a rave was preordained, I have watched William stoically sit through a live concert by a band I know he adores with his hood drawn mournfully over his head. So the boyish animation wrought by Stranger Things: The First Shadow was an effect as magical as the telekinetic wraiths emanating above the actors’ bodies.
William was concerned the show would be too scary. In a pre-curtain survey, he spotted only one other kid his age in the audience, a revelation that prompted dread. But despite abundant shrieking, blood, and pyrotechnics, there was nothing he couldn’t handle. In fact, one moment where a character’s limbs are broken like matchsticks struck William as “funny.” (“They switched her with a mannequin,” he told me—a stagehand maneuver I missed.)
But here’s a critique: “There were a lot of swear words.” William also winced through jokey high school sex talk, and there was a peekaboo moment where one of the actresses appears with nothing but fake spiders on her breasts (he gasped).
“This wasn’t made with kids in mind,” William said. “It’s a lot of dark topics.” True enough. The central tension lies in whether the young Henry Creel (played with twitchy, nerdy menace by Louis McCartney; William: “That actor is so good”) will break bad. At the beginning he’s already gouged out the eyes of a classmate at his previous school, an episode that has prompted the Creel family to relocate to Hawkins, Indiana. The affection of a girl at his new school suggests a happier future for him, but ’tis not to be. More eyes will be gouged, along with Demogorgons summoned and house pets eviscerated.
“The bathroom scene was definitely the scariest,” said William.
Maybe I won’t spoil that one for you.
In case you haven’t heard, Broadway is on a total roll, banking record-breaking ticket sales. Bigger seems definitely to be better these days, and that is certainly the logic that drives Stranger Things, a show that proceeds at fever pitch and never lets up. It will not tax your brain, nor your patience. It’s a laugh and a lark and a ride—especially if you’re 10.
William’s final verdict? “Way better than Hamilton and Matilda.” Put it on the poster.
