Stranger Things: The First Shadow
Opening Night: April 22, 2025
Theater: Marquis Theatre
Website: broadway.strangerthingsonstage.com
In 1959 Hawkins, Indiana, the Creel family seeks a fresh start, especially their teenage son Henry, who is eager to escape his troubled past. Initially, things go well — he finds friendship and joins the school play. But when a wave of shocking crimes strikes the town, Henry is forced to confront a terrifying truth: is something inside him that connects him to the horrors unfolding around him? As this thrilling mystery races forward, shadows of the past are unleashed, relationships are tested, and the town of Hawkins faces the ultimate question: Can the power of friendship outshine the darkness within?
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April 22, 2025
“The First Shadow” fulfills its franchise requirements in terms of spectacular art direction and compliance to the series’ canon (to which it adds tantalizing tidbits). Whether it is satisfying as a piece of theater is a dicier proposition.
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April 23, 2025
Three hours in the “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” universe passes in a blink. By the end, you’re convinced they’ve pulled off another trick: an exorbitant spectacle wrapped around the scrappy, gushy heart of the original.
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April 22, 2025
Enough can’t be said that this production doesn’t just change the game of Broadway, it smashes the game board and shoots it into a new dimension. When you take one of the most watched television shows in history and bring it to the stage, the pressure is high but Netflix and producer Sonia Friedman cracked the code thanks to the work of hundreds of artisans and crew—a nod should be given to Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher for their work on illusions and visual effects. Stranger Things: The First Shadow may just be the best production, visually speaking, to ever hit Broadway—well in this universe, anyway.
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April 22, 2025
The First Shadow, now an integral part of the ST canon, is an absolute must-see for all enthusiasts, and it will certainly inspire some of the uninitiated to binge the original (mission accomplished, Netflix). I’m betting this gateway to the Upside Down will remain open for a long time.
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April 23, 2025
If The First Shadow is purely an act of fan service, at least it’s an unapologetic and, if the audience around me was any judge, satisfying one. Is it a play? I mean, yes-ish? Is it an extravagant TV-meets-theater-meets-theme-park hybrid that probably has not entirely heartening implications for the future of Broadway? For sure. Is it also so unrelentingly absurd that it’s hard to be mad at? Absolutely.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2025
Immersive, heartfelt, and exhilarating, First Shadow is a must-see spectacle for the Stranger Things obsessive as much as it is for the theater aficionado who wants to see the medium pushed to new heights. It does a phenomenal job of not only fleshing out a complicated character, but also providing context for the extreme lengths that Henry goes to in the TV series.
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April 23, 2025
Nothing is left unscathed. Jump-scare noises blow out your eardrums. Blinding lights and raining sparks make you crave Anna Wintour’s indoor sunglasses. And there’s so much billowing haze that on the evening I attended, a family in the front row sprinted up the aisle after five minutes as though their house had caught fire.
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April 22, 2025
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.
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April 22, 2025
The Netflix series, at its best, delivers a gritty film noir quality to this supernatural tale. What’s on stage at the Marquis resembles a jukebox musical comedy with lots of shock effects haphazardly thrown in.
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April 22, 2025
The First Shadow doesn’t offer much by way of characters or plot beyond adding meager flesh to already familiar bones. And padding a skeleton doesn’t make it scarier, just bulkier.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2025
Stranger Things: The First Shadow is a lot of show. It is at once possession horror, family melodrama, high school dramedy, Cold War thriller, and haunted house nightmare, lurching from one tone to the next scene by scene. It is astonishing simply for its scale, and never boring, if seldom technically or dramatically satisfying.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2025
The production is technically impressive in all respects, but when the sinister Dr. Brenner (Alex Breaux)—Matthew Modine in the series—made his ominous appearance at the close of the first act, I fantasized about pulling him aside to ask for a sedative. Although in truth the show itself was already soporific enough.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2025
Oh, yes, special effects are a huge explanation for the Stranger Things series raison d’etre, and now the production’s Great White Way patrons have renowned stage craftspersons at their disposal. Credits go to lighting designer Jon Clark, sound designer Paul Arditti, illusions and visual effects designers Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher, and video and visual effects designers 59. Again and sorry to say, these are abundant but not as overwhelming as expected.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2025
So here it is, the Broadway show as theme park, right down to the three-storied façade of the ebony mansion through which all patrons must pass en route to their seats and the merch, and a thrill ride not to be forgotten. The goal is an immersive experience, and to my mind not only have they achieved it, but it’s a helluva lot more fun and exciting than the average “civilized” immersive (looking at you, Sleep No More). Are there enough of the fans and the curious to make it last and pay off? Only time will tell, just as only time will determine its chances to attract a whole new generation to the joys of live theater. Stranger things have happened.
READ THE REVIEWApril 22, 2025
Daldry and Martin are, of course, talented and highly experienced directors of major stage spectacles, and “Stranger Things” is far from a hack job or mere brand exploitation. It has been forged with integrity, especially in the superior first act, before the show gets trapped in one of its bespoke devices: creepy stuff happening during the production of a high school play.
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April 22, 2025
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.
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April 22, 2025
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.
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