‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ Broadway Review: Hell Breaks Loose

Broadway goes Upside Down with Stranger Things: The First Shadow, opening tonight at the Marquis Theatre and setting a new standard for what’s capable in high-tech spectacle on the legitimate stage. Director Stephen Daldry, playwright Kate Trefry and young star Louis McCartney, invaluably assisted by a top-rate crew of designers and special effects wizards, bring an exciting, bump-in-the-night creature feature to Broadway.

Scary is a rarity for Broadway. There was the creepy Grey House a few seasons ago, and you might when King Kong lumbered around a stage a while back, but Stranger Things: The First Shadow easily outdoes them for jump scares and genuine thrills. Some of the magical derring-do is reminiscent of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (written by Jack Thorne, who, along with the Duffer Brothers and Trefry wrote the original story on which First Shadow is based). That massive battleship bow that crashes on stage, seemingly out of thin air, might put you in mind of Miss Saigon‘s helicopter or The Phantom of the Opera‘s crashing chandelier, but the visual enchantment of Stranger Things makes all those earlier productions seem downright cute.

So sure of itself is the big, splashy Stranger Things that the arrival of the ship’s bow, with bolts of electricity covering the doomed vessel like so many spider webs, comes within about the first 10 minutes of the show, as if its creators are offering an appetizer. In this smoke-filled, strobe-lit scene, we see, for just the briefest black-out moment, an honest to goodness monster, and some of the loudest blasts of musical booms to bring the jump scares home. Silly? Maybe. Overmuch? Probably. Anyway, you’re hooked.

But first thing’s first: You don’t need to be an expert or even a casual fan of Netflix’s Stranger Things series. I’m couldn’t pick a demogorgon from a line-up of Mind Flayers, and while I detected from the audience reactions that this character or that one carries some baggage, this origin-story play is written so that context pretty much explains everything. Stranger Things: The First Shadow is a stand-alone prequel to the series, and its creators say the play is, in fact, canon to its mythical universe, and could be referenced in the upcoming Season Five of the series.

So, here’s where we start. Following a brief (and pretty fantastic) prologue set in World War II and involving a history-making secret U.S. experiment that attempts to make a warship invisible – let’s just say things go haywire and dimensions are breached – the story proper begins in 1959, some 25 years before the action of the TV series. The young Creel family – dad Victor (T.R. Knight), mom Virginia (Rosie Benton), daughter Alice (Poppy Lovell) and, of course, Henry (McCartney, in a career-making performance), the barely teen son who is more than a little, well, stranger than most.

Henry – he’s one of the characters that fans of the TV series will know, by name if nothing else – arrives in the family’s new house where he promptly stands alone facing the audience looking like some blank-faced combination of Martin Short’s Ed Grimley, Pee-wee Herman and the kid from The Omen. He clutches a ’50s-model Captain Midnight portable radio, from which, to Henry’s ears, more than music pours forth. Strange voices come through, or sometimes even his mom and dad having a conversation about their odd little boy. Oh, and its given to shooting electrical jolts, particularly when Henry has one hand on the radio and the other on a surprised human.

We learn soon enough that the Creels have arrived in the lovely if Twin Peaks-ish Hawkins, Indiana, having made a quick getaway after something bad happened in their old neighborhood: Seems a boy had his eyes poked out “accidentally” by little Henry, who has been acting very, very peculiar since he went missing in a cave for a few hours years before, on his eighth birthday.

With the series’ characteristic mix of science fiction, horror, drama, mystery, comedy, nostalgia and coming-of-age adventures, The First Shadow charts young Henry’s impact on his family, his school and himself. Impact No. 1: Neighborhood pets start turning up dead, their bodies twisted and their eyes gouged out.

Befriended by classmate Patty Newby (Gabrielle Nevaeh), a mixed-race, motherless adoptee who shares both Henry’s love of comic books and his outsider self-consciousness, young Mr. Creel begins to make some inroads at school, in particular landing the lead role of a witch-boy who falls in love with a human girl in the school play (typecasting, no doubt – Patty plays the human girl).

Still, Henry can’t stop hiding away in the family attic, wearing a blindfold and zoning out to his radio’s static. When the voices from beyond show him horrendous, nightmarish visions – like that first cat murder (fairly graphically depicted with some grizly special effects) the visions, if that’s all they are, prove true.

Other characters enter the fray, with some students hunting for the pet-killer to get a reward, including James Hopper, Jr. played by Back to the Future‘s Burke Swanson, and Patty’s half-brother, the school d.j. and resident electronic gizmo wiz Bob Newby (Juan Carlos). Joining this scooby gang is Joyce Maldonado (Alison Jaye), the school play student-director who wants nothing more than to graduate and get out of Hawkins. (Viewers of the TV series will know these character names, and here get a chance to see their origins).

Interspersed and sometimes colliding with all the comic theater-kid shenanigans is Henry’s horror plot, in which the voices coming through Henry’s radio get stronger and stronger, as does Henry with each gruesome kill. When his worried mom finally sees exactly what’s going on in the attic – and the audience is treated to yet another showstopper as Henry’s voice lowers to Exorcist levels and weird spider legs start poking out of his torso (possessed Henry knows your fears, and in mom’s case that’s spiders) – she seeks out the help of an expert, Dr. Brenner (Alex Breaux). Series fans will know this isn’t the good news mom thinks it is.

Brenner is actually a top-secret government guy, who recruits Henry into a nefarious experiment that’s been going on since World War II: Brenner and his colleagues know what happened to that battle ship, and they know Henry is able to somehow harness the connection he has with what will become known as the Upside Down, that Dimension X where horrific creatures dwell. Now those are demogorgons, a sort of mash-up of the Gill-man from the Black Lagoon and Stripe the mean one from Gremlins and they’re just killing for a chance to use Henry as a crossover into our world.

You don’t really need much more summary than that, although much more happens in tiny Hawkins. While the play’s plotting sometimes seems unwieldy and the teen dialogue can verge on Happy Days, both are probably better than they need to be. After all, it’s the special effect set pieces that Stranger Things really wants us to see: a cat floating in mid-air, to grisly ends; Henry helping Patty find her birth absent mother by sharing his visions (hint: she’s in Vegas, singing in a nightclub no less); Henry shocking Patty and her father the school principal by revealing exactly what he does in the attic, his body levitating, music and screams amplified to rock-concert levels, lights flashing and bodies, well, no spoilers on that one except to say remember the cat.

The attic scene is a stunner, as are scenes set in Brenner’s lab, in which a barely willing Henry is used to tear open the barrier between dimensions, with that demogorgon we saw back in WWII making another appearance. Stage smoke swirls into fantastic shapes, a massive monster-shaped puppet – Enter the Mind Flayer! – descends from the rafters; a school gathering goes Carrie-bad and a family dinner fares even worse. Much worse.

The production finds much of its magic and nightmare hallucinations in Miriam Buether’s brilliant set design that takes the story from the World War II battleship to ’50s suburbia, school rooms (and, for one frightening scene, a school bathroom), Brenner’s cold, ice-cube shaped laboratory, and on to other dimensions. Paul Arditti’s sound design might just as well be listed as a separate character, its impact present throughout. Jon Clark’s lighting design and black-outs are so split-second quick we’re often left wondering if we’ve really seen what we’ve just seen (and, better yet, we don’t have time to focus on the monsters long enough to pick them apart). D.J. Walde’s music compositions and orchestrations carry their own spine tingles, and yes, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s theme music from the series is given its rightful pride of place. Also like the series, period hit songs set perfect moods (or offset them, as the case may be), from Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” and Ella Fitzgerald’s “Dream a Little Dream of Me” to Patience & Prudence’s “Tonight You Belong to Me.”

Praise also to 59 Productions for the video design and effects, the illusion design by Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher, costumes by Brigitte Reiffenstuel, and Coral Messam’s choreography. Special mention for the movement direction by Lynne Page: McCartney’s contortions and bends at odd angles contribute no small amount to the overall creepy thriller vibe.

McCartney, of course, is the revelation here, a relative newcomer to the stage (he originated Henry on the West End) who brings an intensity and a vulnerability that gives the character life and allows the audience to take all of this stuff seriously. He’s matched by his frequent scene mate Nevaeh as the sympathetic girlfriend, and Knight as Henry’s drunken, troubled father with secrets.

Sinister is the word for Breaux’s Brenner, a character that melds the mad scientist with the cutthroat bureaucrat, sprinkled with a touch of the child-groomer. He’s a nasty piece of work.

Herding all of it into a smashing piece of entertainment is director Daldry (The Inheritance, Billy Elliot: The Musical) and his co-director and frequent collaborator Justin Martin (Prima Facie), who funnel all the moving parts, colors, smoke, mirrors and monsters into a non-stop thrill ride. Sure, it’s more surface than substance, and its depictions of how we humans long for connection of any sort is sincere if not particularly original. But just try not to be tickled by even the simplest of the show’s trickery, like when a book fallen from a school locker flies right back in. At one point in the play, young, brainwashed Henry, under the villainous Brenner’s sway, can only surrender to the dark magic. I know the feeling.

Title: Stranger Things: The First Shadow
Venue: Broadway’s Marquis Theatre
Written By: Kate Trefry, based on an original story by the Duffer brothers, Jack Thorne and Trefry
Directed by: Stephen Daldry
Co-Directed by: Justin Martin
Cast: Rosie Benton, Alex Breaux, Andrew Hovelson, Alison Jaye,T.R. Knight, Louis McCartney, Burke Swanson with Janie Brookshire, Kelsey Anne Brown, Malcolm Callender, Ta’Rea Campbell, Juan Carlos, Antoinette Comer, Robert T. Cunningham, Ayana Cymone, Tom D’Agustino, Victor de Paula Rocha, Ian Michael Dolley, Dora Dolphin, Nya Garner, Logan Gould, Shea Grant, Rebecca Hurd, Ted Koch, Jamie Martin Mann, Patrick Scott McDermott, Sean Mikesh, Stephen Wattrus, Maya West, Eric Wiegand, Graham Winton
Running time: 2 hrs 35 min (with one intermission)