Stephen King apparently returns to Broadway. After a disastrous debut with the musical “Carrie” in 1988, the best-selling novelist found much more success with William Goldman’s stage adaptation of “Misery,” with Laurie Metcalf winning a Tony for best actress in a play.
I never thought of King while watching a few episodes of the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” I couldn’t get him out of my mind while watching “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” which opened Tuesday at the Marquis Theatre after its world premiere in London.
This stage adaptation could be retitled “The Dreaming.” The disturbed teenage Henry Creel (Louis McCartney, who is absolutely riveting) has a love-hate relationship with his portable radio, the static of which allows him to manifest dreams or enter into them. (I’m not sure which.) In the most typical King tradition, Henry can blow up pet cats, laboratory hamsters and, yes, people by simply marshalling his powers, which are seemingly infinite.
The New York Times recently published an article on “Strangers Things: The First Shadow.” Since this report focuses on the show’s enormous set (by Miriam Buether), illusions and visual effects (by Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher) and video and visual effects (by 59), the playwright Kate Trefy is not mentioned until halfway through the article. Trefy, who also writes for the TV series, weighs in with only one quote regarding her stage adaptation of the Duffer Brothers’ original story about the small townspeople who are terrorized by a hostile alternate dimension called the Upside Down.
Trefry gets off easy in that article. Her stage play is a muddled, pedestrian prequel, set in the 1950s, in which a government experiment-gone-wrong unleashes lots of ill effects. 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. My personal favorite stunner comes when Henry conjures up a nightmare that has haunted his mother (Rosie Benton, being very tall), and he soon finds himself wrapped in multiple insect legs.
Elsewhere, the special effects are much less imaginative. The Times article makes much of the show’s opening scene in which scientists attempt to render a U.S. battleship invisible, by sending it to another dimension. Under Stephen Daldry’s direction, the visuals are big and accompanied by lots of noise (sound design by Paul Arditti), but sorry, I’ve been more frightened by the appearance of the ghost ship in any number of stagings of “The Flying Dutchman.” Then again, the Wagner libretto is far better material, and special effects mean nothing if they don’t emerge from a strong story.
Anyone who took Shakespeare 101 in college knows all about comic relief. Trefry’s many efforts at comic relief translate into endless scenes showing rehearsals for a high school production of a scary play called “The Dark of the Moon.” The performances of the students are so broad they make the cartoon characters in “Boop!” appear downright Chekhovian.
Daldry ladles on the feel-good nostalgia by loading “Stranger Things” with lots of pop hits from the 1950s. Someone has watched “Grease” twice too often.
A bright spot is the creepy, often loopy performance of McCartney. His subtly delayed delivery produces the show’s only genuinely funny moments. He’s unarguably the best special effect in the show’s first act. Unfortunately, in the second act, he is required to do little more than impersonate a person enduring electro-shock treatments.
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