What’s stranger than “Stranger Things”? Maybe a three-hour stage prequel to a TV show that hasn’t even finished airing.
“Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” now playing at the Marquis Theatre on Broadway following a West End run, is an unapologetically commercial, FX-driven fan experience that attempts to stretch the Netflix franchise into new theatrical territory, borrowing the blueprint of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” but missing the ingenuity, heart, and narrative magic.
Whereas “Cursed Child” built off a concluded series, “First Shadow” unfolds while “Stranger Things” still looms large on streaming, which makes it feel less like a story that needed to be told and more like a promotional push to build buzz ahead of the show’s upcoming final season. (Netflix, fittingly, is the show’s lead producer.) And in case you forget that you’re sitting inside an expensive IP product, the show’s iconic synth theme and title design are employed to elicit audience cheers.
The result? A three-hour fan wiki brought to life, complete with origin stories, stilted dialogue, lame jokes, and sequences seemingly constructed only to set up the next visual effect. Yes, there are plenty of them: levitations, transformations, and a monstrous spider that hovers over the audience like the Phantom’s chandelier. Some in the crowd who were dressed like they were attending Comic Con rather than a Broadway show ate it up.
Be warned: the show can be unapologetically creepy. Fans of the TV series won’t be surprised by its grotesque imagery, jump scares, and psychological horror. But for those unfamiliar with the tone or mythos, the effect can be genuinely jarring. At times, the production resembles a haunted house experience more than a drama, with intense sound effects, fog flooding the aisles, and unsettling visuals like a boy writhing in pain as spider legs burst from his body.
The plot focuses on Henry Creel, the tortured boy who eventually becomes the show’s Big Bad. Played with intensity and physical commitment by Louis McCartney, Henry’s descent into darkness is long, loud, and ultimately predictable. The backstory-heavy exposition begins with a World War II-era lab experiment gone awry and ends just where the Netflix series begins. In between, we meet teenage versions of adult fan favorites—Joyce, Hopper, and Bob Newby—though they mostly feel like filler characters, rendered with varying degrees of camp and awkward nostalgia.
Alison Jaye plays Joyce (who is played on the series by Winona Ryder) as an exuberant high school theater geek who bears little resemblance to the frazzled, working-class single mom fans know from the show. Burke Swanson’s Hopper is a laid-back greaser, more rebel-without-a-cause than the grizzled sheriff we meet later on. Alex Breaux, as Dr. Brenner, exudes the requisite slick menace of a corporate villain in a Marvel film. As Henry’s father, Victor Creel, T.R. Knight is far less effective than Robert Englund (“A Nightmare on Elm Street”), who made a chilling cameo appearance as an older version of the character on the series.
Stephen Daldry directs with flair, and you can’t say there isn’t money onstage. The production goes big, flooding the theater with smoke, having actors storm the aisles in hazmat suits, and turning the Marquis Theatre lobby into a giant replica of the Creel House.
There’s an inspired final gag at the end that mimics the Netflix end screen, which asks the viewer whether they want to watch the next episode or the credits. But it also underscores the show’s existential dilemma: Why isn’t this onstage instead of being another episode? One suspects that Netflix will eventually film the production and make it available for streaming, which may explain why so much money has been poured into its design, effects, and marketing.
Broadway may be open to big-budget extensions of TV properties—expect “Squid Game: Origins” any day now, along with a previously announced “Game of Thrones” prequel—but storytelling, not brand loyalty, is what separates genuine drama from glorified fan service.
Marquis Theatre, 1535 Broadway, broadway.strangerthingsonstage.com.
