The ‘Stranger Things' Broadway show is a terrifying cash grab

Washington Post

23-04-2025

If Netflix were in the theme park business, 'Stranger Things: The First Shadow' would make a crown-jewel attraction.
The streamer's Broadway debut, now in residence at the Marquis Theatre, is a chaotic fire hose of fan-service with enough sensory stimulation to make even the most experienced gamer want to puke just a little. Devotees of the byzantine fantasy series may even savor the confusion of trying to figure out, from one flash-bang moment to the next, what exactly is going on. And anyone who's dreamed of snuggling a Demogorgon can drop by the merch counter for a horrifying plushie.
But the extravagantly staged brand extension is a Broadway play only in the technical sense — in address, price point and duration. To draw audiences through its nearly three hours, the show lurches forward like an episodic binge-watch, banking on and rewarding extensive familiarity with the sci-fi hit. (Not a bad bet, considering Season 4 dominated Nielsen ratings when it was released in 2022.) Both new and existing characters are sketched in bare-boned detail and set into motion, spinning the ever-more convoluted mythology of 'Stranger Things' deeper into the nether-verse. Newcomers beware.
Supplemental content that costs exponentially more than monthly Netflix dues, with or without ads? Yes. Theater? Not really.
Written by Kate Trefry, who's also a writer on the series, the play acts as both prequel and villain origin story, not unlike 'Wicked' to 'The Wizard of Oz,' only steeped in trauma and murder rather than heart. (Hey, at least it's not a musical.) The action flashes back from the mid-1980s to 1959, when the adults on the show — Winona Ryder's hand-wringing mom, Joyce, and David Harbour's gruff good cop, Jim — were high-schoolers themselves. (The franchise's omnivorous appetite for regurgitating '80s classics now includes 'Back to the Future.')
The baddie in question is Henry Creel, played with deeply unnerving intensity by Louis McCartney, reprising his role from the production's 2023 West End premiere. Introduced in Season 4 as the ultimate evildoer behind the many evil doings in Hawkins, Indiana, here Henry is the weird new kid in school with a very obviously dark past. Did he somehow inherit PTSD from his war-addled father (T.R. Knight)? Does the devil possess his soul through the radio? And what's his beef with neighborhood pets, anyway?
No matter. When the darkness takes over, he's like a goblin struck by lightning after chugging a sixer of Bang Energy: feral, jittery and out for blood. Whose it is … kind of doesn't matter? Or maybe has something to do with what they're most afraid of. Young Joyce (Alison Jaye) asserts that the central question of the school play within the play — the closest to theatrical DNA as 'The First Shadow' gets — is whether love can defeat fear. Presumably that question also governs Henry's mayhem, but we'll have to take Joyce at her word: The how and why of his deadly fits are a muddle.
The staging, led by director Stephen Daldry, has several marvelous, how-on-Earth-did-they moments, including a nautical opening sequence that rewinds to 1943, tying some of the narrative's origins to a World War II military plot gone awry. Cue haze, gunshots and a massive ship tipped vertiginously on its axis. (The set is by Miriam Buether, lights by Jon Clark and sound by Paul Arditti.) A barrage of projected headlines and classified files point to the series's unwieldy grab bag of Cold War bogeymen (Russia, U.S. military intelligence, monsters, etc.), whizzing by as though comprehension were beside the point.
Often it is. The production's visual effects, designed by Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher with video design by 59, are among the most spectacular — and certainly the most frightening — on Broadway. (Yes, there are plenty of nosebleeds.) They are also a distraction from the script, which traffics in the incidents, mini quests and breadcrumbs of intrigue that entice streaming viewers to click on the next episode. But straining to make sense of a play, which lives and dies in the moment, is not dramatic engagement.
Like 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,' 'The First Shadow' explores the ties that bind and sever children from their parents. (The 'Harry Potter' play was written by Jack Thorne, who collaborated on the original story here with Trefry and series creators the Duffer Brothers.) But 'The First Shadow' is decidedly less kid-friendly and vaguely Oedipal: Mothers are stalked and fetishized, fathers maimed and blinded. Though these dynamics tie into series lore, onstage they come across as lurid and empty provocations. The acting style under Daldry — emphatic and often at extremes — seems another casualty of not breaking free from the small screen.
It's likely that everything here will be treated with more coherent detail in the fifth and final season of 'Stranger Things,' set for release later this year, since the play won't be essential viewing for fans. But timing makes this production, and the one still running in London, shrewd commercial tie-ins — and perhaps a more promising investment than the 'rotating immersive experiences' that Netflix plans to open, also later this year, in vacant department stores. Either way, nostalgia continues its lurking reign — whether on Broadway or down at the mall.
Stranger Things: The First Shadow, ongoing at the Marquis Theatre in New York. Around 2 hours and 45 minutes with an intermission. broadway.strangerthingsonstage.com.