Just like the Netflix series, Broadway‘s “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” is full of terrifying monsters, breath-taking special effects and it’s up for several top prizes this award season. After debuting on the West End in 2023, the play, which is a prequel to the blockbuster Netflix show, took Broadway by storm and received five Tony nominations, including a special award for its illusions and technical effects.
“The First Shadow” follows young Henry Creel, played by Tony nominee Louis McCartney, who later becomes the super-powered villain Vecna in “Stranger Things.” Taking place in the ’50s, the show includes high school versions of Jim Hopper, Joyce Byers, Bob Newby and a young Dr. Brenner, who is the mastermind behind the experiments that gave Eleven her powers in “Stranger Things.”
One of the show-stopping moments comes during a deadly dinner scene with the Creel family, when Henry’s powers are fully unleashed and his mother Virginia is telekinetically floated up in the air and has her limbs broken. There’s also a giant mind flayer monster that descends upon the stage and looms over the audience. It’s one of many eye-popping stunts in the show — and one that its creators are staying tight-lipped on how exactly it was made.
“The timing of that sequence is really, really tight,” said illusion and special effects designer Chris Fisher. “There’s a whole lead-up into that scene, and you learn a little bit about why Henry does what he does. We go into the Creel family dinner, the scene starts, the table is laid, they all sit down, Henry is at the front and then smoke starts to come from his hand and wafts all around him. That starts our sequence. From then on, it’s pinpoint accuracy of everything. Everything has to happen really, really quickly.”
Evan Zimmerman
The Creel dinner scene appeared in “Stranger Things” Season 4, so the Broadway team had a template to work from. For Virginia, they “created this quite horrific head with a jaw broken and eyes in the back of the socket,” Fisher said. The dummy, which the team dubbed “Spinny Ginny,” switches out seamlessly with Virginia actor Rosie Benton.
“We had to translate it for the stage, so the colors were enhanced, because stage lighting kind of absorbs color,” said Tony-nominated costume designer Brigitte Reiffenstuel. “We have to go quite a bit more bold for everything to communicate and for the people in the last row to understand. In terms of Spinny Ginny, she is really a copy of what Virginia Creel wears for that moment.”
Then comes the massive mind flayer that appears from the ceiling — and make sure you don’t call it a puppet.
“It’s a huge automated monster system,” said illusion and special effects designer Jamie Harrison. “I couldn’t tell you how many working parts there are, but easily hundreds when you consider all of the jointing and different motors and automation. It’s very high-tech system that deploys it. It unfurls forward so that it’s actually over the audience. If you’re sitting in the first 10 rows, you’ve got a crane up to look at it.”
To create the mind flayer effect, the “First Shadow” team had to do some construction on the theater. It’s by far the largest of the show’s more than 60 unique special effects, which also includes multiple nose bleeds, gunshots, exploding lights and much more.
“A piece of the ceiling had to be taken out in the Marquis to fit it in, and then it falls out quite beautifully in that moment and falls back in,” set designer Miriam Buether said about the mind flayer.
“There’s sound that comes with it, there’s smoke, video, scenery, lighting, costume changes,” added set designer Ben Pearcy. “It’s every department working together closely to make things happen.”
Matthew Murphy
There are so many technical elements that the lighting system at the theater had to be upgraded to house more than 32,000 electricity channels. In the show’s West End run, the lighting team had to hand over some of the LED controls to the video department because they ran out of capacity. In some of the most creepy moments of the show, every single one of those lights can be flicked off to achieve complete darkness.
“We upgraded the system at the Marquis Theatre to allow us to turn off the aisle lights,” said Tony-nominated lighting designer Jon Clark. “Obviously, there are a lot of rules about doing these things. It all has to be passed through the authorities. At certain moments, we have something called a dead man’s switch, which allows us to turn off the aisle lights and extraneous light in the auditorium to achieve a really dark auditorium.”
At the center of the show is Henry Creel actor Louis McCartney, who was nominated for best actor in a play for his unnerving, spastic performance. As Henry, Louis changes his voice from a nerdy outcast who can’t fit in to a possessed monster who terrorizes Hawkins.
“You create healthy ways to fling your neck and not break anything,” McCartney said of his performance. “There’s a lot of stuff you do with your face and it looks like you’re tensing it, but all I’m doing is just talking and it looks like you’re having an epileptic fit.”
To get into the headspace of Henry, who causes the deaths of his mother and young sister at the dinner scene, McCartney listened to heavy music or gets energy from his Dr. Brenner co-star Alex Breaux.
“Alex Breaux is just insane,” he said. “He is an animal and attacks. I’m going off to do Act 1 and he stays there until Act 2, because that’s when he comes in, and he gives me a word or a phrase or slaps me on the back or something to get me fired up. He gave me ‘shiv’ yesterday. What does that even mean? Who knows? It’s for me to work out it. That’s exciting. Other people are there to fire me up and I fire them up, and it’s this cohesive thing where we’re all teammates.”
To help with Henry’s transformation, Tony-nominated sound designer Paul Arditti leads a team that tracks McCartney’s dialogue down to the word to turn it into a demonic growl.
“The mixing desk is pushing a fader at exactly the right syllable to make sure that voice turns into the monster and then restores back to human,” he said. “We’re adding in literally hundreds of sound effects cues which have to happen exactly at the right time.”
With all of the actors and teams working so closely, it’s no wonder “First Shadow” is a terrifying treat for “Stranger Things” fans.
“It’s the most complicated show that I’ve ever worked on,” said Pearcy. “And it’ a thrill to be part of.”
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