Stranger Things: The First Shadow Is About to Turn Broadway Upside Down

The 2024-25 Broadway season is shaping up to be unusually big on special effects.

Beginning performances in September, McNeal will feature a “Metahuman” digital likeness of its star, Robert Downey Jr.; in November, Maybe Happy Ending, a musical centered around a sweet love story between two robots, promises to feature technologically advanced video projections; Jamie Lloyd’s highly anticipated Sunset Boulevard comes from the West End with ambitious and advanced videography that is central to the production; and the Sarah Snook-starring The Picture of Dorian Gray, strongly believed to be Broadway-bound in spring 2025, similarly promises a dazzling interplay between live action and video elements.

Judging by reports from London, Stranger Things: The First Shadow, set to open on Broadway in spring 2025, is on another level entirely. An immersive veritable special-effects extravaganza—achieved through a mixture of traditional stage magic and cutting-edge tech—it may inspire more disbelieving cries of “How did they do that?” than any other Broadway show ever.

Working with an idea from the Duffer brothers and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child playwright Jack Thorne, writer Kate Trefry, a staff writer on the Netflix series, was encouraged to feel free to write the play as if she were writing for the screen—in other words, to not let her imagination be constrained by any perceived limits of what was possible in a live medium.

By all accounts, she did not hold back—with the director Stephen Daldry, scenic designer Miriam Buether and a creative team that includes two illusion and visual effects specialists ultimately managing to bring her terrific, phantasmagoric visions to jaw-dropping life.

Broadway audiences have longed to be dazzled since the days of Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic—the equipment has just evolved. With all due respect to Miss Saigon’s 8,000-pound whirlybird and the hulking animatronic primate of King Kong, the Broadway premiere of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child heralded the beginning of a new caliber of theatrical dazzlement. It's theater with a cinematic sensibility, but actually offering the kinds of visceral thrills, spills and wow-factor you'd expect of Disney’s theme-park Imagineers. (Anyone who caught the unexpurgated version of Cursed Child in a single day will testify to the brainwashed disorientation of the experience—much like the sensation of having spent a day at the Magic Kingdom.)

Stranger Things feels set to be another milestone in this journey. It is unashamedly appealing to a wider demographic than, say, The Pirates of Penzance; no surprise that, at the time of the West End opening, 55% of audience members were first-time theatergoers. In fact it feels absolutely crucial to the show’s appeal that, like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, it is a large-scale theatrical spectacular with sky-high production values that’s proudly not a musical. Think of it as a splashy musical with the song and dance switched out for stunning set pieces, smoke and mirrors, shock and awe. 

It feels weird and somehow feeble—a little 19th-century—to call the thing a “play.” Trefry's playscript of Stranger Things: The First Shadow doesn’t necessarily belong on the same Drama Book Shop shelf as Shakespeare or Chekhov or August Wilson or Caryl Churchill. Nor should it. Call it an event, an attraction, an experience. (The production won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play, which feels hilariously British as well as perfectly apt.)

Special effects on Broadway are an even more exciting drawcard given the current state of visual effects at the cineplex. Some time between the computer-generated velociraptors stalking onto the screen in Jurassic Park and the umpteenth cataclysmic climax in a Marvel movie, audiences became bored stiff with CG. Even the deaging of Hollywood stars—we’re looking at you, Robert Downey Jr.—has lost its stunning novelty.

In a live setting, though, convincing, cunningly executed illusions have seemingly lost none of their power to amaze since the Ancient Egyptians first went goggle-eyed over displays of sleight of hand. The time-traveling DeLorean in the Back to the Future movies is a lot of fun; the theatrical equivalent at the Winter Garden drives audiences absolutely freaking bonkers eight times a week.

Broadway will always be a site of extraordinary, human-powered storytelling. But it seems increasingly likely that Broadway's biggest blockbusters will explore new ways to thrill, astonish and—how often do you expect this from a night out at the theater?—terrify audiences.

Might this new season broaden the idea of what people expect from a Broadway show once and for all? Stranger things have happened. Now, pass the pocorn.