Behind the Curtain, the Netflix documentary about the making of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, is framed as a story of triumph, chronicling the creative agonies of wresting a hit play from the messy, chaotic process of staging a massive theatrical extravaganza. But if you’ve seen The First Shadow, which I did at New York’s Marquis Theatre last week, the documentary plays as something else: the story of how an Oscar-nominated director and a Tony-winning producer combined to produce one of the worst things I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage.
Great art has often sprung from crass commercialism: Before Greta Gerwig got her hands on the project, who would have thought a movie about Barbie was a good idea? But The First Shadow doesn’t even try to hide the fact that it’s a glorified teaser for the final season of Netflix’s most popular show—and, at nearly three hours long and with a top ticket price over $300, a particularly tedious and expensive one. The story, such as it is, concerns the teenage years of Henry Creel, who, with the help of the malevolent Dr. Martin Brenner, will grow up to be the series’ skinless, noseless Big Bad, Vecna. But while the play purports to give its audience of Stranger Things devotees a look at the formative versions of its adult characters, including scattered single mother Joyce Byers, washed-out police chief Jim Hopper, and the genial nerd Bob Newby (RIP), it feels hemmed in from every direction by a dictate not to reveal anything that might make fans of the show who can’t afford a trip to London or New York feel as if they’re missing out, to maximize spectacle and minimize content and hope ticket-buyers are too dazzled to notice the difference. (It also doesn’t explain why the grown-up Hopper and Joyce haven’t been more forthcoming about that weird kid they knew in high school.)
Behind the Curtain feels similarly constrained by head-office dictates. As The First Shadow’s original production in London gets closer and closer to opening night, with its script still in major flux and its elaborate special effects still failing at critical moments, the documentary’s cinematographer, Geraint Thomas, goes from being a genial confidant whom cast and crew call “G” to an unwelcome intruder who gets waved off when the difficult decisions are being made. At one point, the show’s novice playwright, Kate Trefry, lifts her eyes from a tense conversation with director Stephen Daldry and alerts him to the presence of a nearby eavesdropper, then whispers a cautionary “Spy cam.” Intent on preserving the stage production’s surprises, the play’s effects designers, Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher, keep their secrets mostly hidden, even when they’re effectively just recreating familiar moments from the TV series, and while Trefry and producer Sonia Freidman frequently talk about needing to cut large blocks of text and radically restructure the story, we’re rarely given any clues as to what’s being eliminated or moved around.
Nonetheless, there are a handful of moments that, while unintelligible to anyone who hasn’t seen the play, offer hints as to just how it ended up as such a disaster. For one thing, there’s the fact that Trefry, who got her professional start as a staff writer on Stranger Things, has never written a play before, and seems generally unfamiliar with the medium as a whole—not only does the play’s production involve her first workshop reading, but her introduction to the concept of one. Early on in Behind the Curtain, she’s asked to describe The First Shadow’s story, and she simply can’t. (The subtitles transcribe her response as, “Okay. Um, this is this, uh … [blabbers].”) She’s the in-house emissary for the Duffer brothers, who created the series and are co-credited with the play’s story, but that also means she’s the one who has to interrupt a production meeting and break the news that “the guys” have changed their plans for the final season, and a plot point that was part of the play has to be pulled out so they can use it on the TV show instead. “Whatever we’re going to say,” she informs the group, “it’s going to be like 80 percent less.” (The documentary bleeps out the subject of the potential spoiler as if it were a curse word.) In another phone conversation, she and the Duffers seem to be sharing doubts about whether the conclusion of the first act, which ends with an actor appearing on stage and introducing themselves as a familiar character from the show, packs enough of a dramatic wallop. The documentary doesn’t reveal the outcome of that exchange, but it would appear that the fans won that argument: The first act still ends with that character saying their own name, and the audience I was sitting in howled their approval.
To fans of Stranger Things, it’s not a surprise when that character—who, screw it, is the younger version of Matthew Modine’s Dr. Brenner, played here by Alex Breaux—makes his way into young Henry’s life. In fact, viewers already know the outline of much of what happens in the play, specifically that Henry (Louis McCartney) goes from being an awkward and somewhat off-putting boy to being a nascent serial killer with psychic powers, torturing animals and eventually murdering his mother and little sister. What’s amazing about The First Shadow is how little expanding the story, from a few minutes of flashbacks to nearly three hours on stage, adds. We get a lot of forcibly upbeat banter between the other students at Hawkins High, including the teenage Hopper (Burke Swanson), Bob (Juan Carlos), and Joyce (Alison Jaye), the latter of whom is so peppy and garrulous, she seems more like a younger version of Lorelai Gilmore than Winona Ryder’s frazzled mom. The strength of Stranger Things, at least in its initial seasons, was the way it juxtaposed the mundanity of small-town life with the increasingly fantastic elements of its plot. But instead of playing Dungeons and Dragons in a wood-paneled basement, the play’s regular characters act like they’re in a production of Bye Bye Birdie, shattering any sense of reality that the hunt for a telekinetic sociopath with ties to another dimension might disrupt.
From an opening prologue in which the prow of a massive battleship appears on stage, The First Shadow serves up plenty of razzle-dazzle: Characters appear to be menaced by ghostly doubles and be thrown through the air, and there are even a few cameos from the TV show’s demonic creepy-crawlies. But while Harrison and Fisher’s effects for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child mixed new technology with old-school theatrical magic, The First Shadow doesn’t trust audiences to be wowed by people dropping through hidden trap doors, relying so heavily on digital projections and screens—so many screens—that you might as well have stayed home and watched it on a laptop. McCartney, the only cast member to cross over from the London production, does his best with an underwritten role, but there are only so many ways to mime full-body spasms, and he runs out of new ones well before the curtain drops.
If there’s a bright spot in The First Shadow—and it’s a faint one—it’s Gabrielle Nevaeh’s performance as Bob’s younger sister, Patty, who’s also the only significant character new to the Stranger Things universe. It’s not an especially complicated part, but as the only classmate who sees past Henry’s creepy exterior to the tortured soul inside, she’s allowed to play something that at least approaches simplicity, an honest reflection of the teenage struggles that once made the TV show more than a slick nostalgia bath. Unfortunately, she’s the only oasis of quiet in a cacophonous production that’s so clearly designed for the purpose of hyping up its source material that it literally ends with Netflix’s “Watch Next” button projected in a corner of the stage. “When theater’s great,” Stephen Daldry observes in Behind the Curtain, “it can be the most exciting thing you’ve ever seen in your life. When theater’s not great, it’s really, really, really, really terrible.” It may have gotten rave reviews from the British press and even, more bafflingly, an Olivier award, but Stranger Things: The First Shadow is not great.
