The cold open: In television, it’s a scene that begins an episode before the title sequence, often without leading characters but almost always with foreshadowing hooks to confound or set a mood.
Theater doesn’t really have much of a cold open tradition. The expectation is that you introduce the main characters and get moving.
Not so for “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.” The new Broadway play, based on Netflix’s hit horror-science fiction series, starts with a bold five-minute cold open of loud gunfire, marauding Demogorgons and no leading characters. It’s a coup de théâtre, and it swiftly signals that the lead producers, the Broadway heavy-hitter Sonia Friedman and Netflix, are betting their big-money gamble will knock theatergoers’ socks right off.
“We always wanted to open with a big scene and a big moment, something that’s going to shock the audience,” said Ross Duffer, who, with his twin brother, Matt Duffer, created the “Stranger Things” series. Both are credited as the play’s creative producers.
The play is a prequel to the 1980s-set TV series, and gives an origin story about a shy teenager named Henry Creel (played by Louis McCartney) who became an important figure in Season 4. It’s set in small-town Hawkins, Ind., mostly in 1959.
But the prologue takes place in 1943, and acts as an omen of the supernatural elements that drive the series, including the Upside Down, a sinister realm that parallels our own. Friedman credited the cold open to Stephen Daldry, the Tony-winning director who, with Justin Martin, directed “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” on Broadway.
“The instinct of most directors would be to leave that to a little bit later and build up to it,” Friedman said during an interview at the Marquis Theater, where the show is in previews before opening on April 22. “Stephen was like, no, no, I want it right at the beginning.”
The show overall and the cold open in particular were beasts to birth, said Friedman, even more so on Broadway than in London, where the play originated in 2023. The Marquis has about 600 more seats than the West End’s Phoenix Theater, where the show is still running.
“I say this without exaggeration or hyperbole: It’s the most technical and challenging physical production that’s probably ever been onstage,” Friedman said. And this is coming from a producer of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which required a costly redo of the Lyric Theater and featured a slew of illusions that cost a pretty penny.
And the bombast isn’t cheap. “Don’t even ask me how much ‘Stranger Things’ is going to cost,” she was recently quoted saying in The New York Times.
A Complex Sequence
Afloat on a darkened stage are two rectangular boxes that look straight out of a graphic novel. Inside both boxes and in the aisles are crew members of the U.S.S. Eldridge, a battleship anchored in the harbor on a quiet night.
Suddenly, screeching sounds break the stillness as the lights flicker, then go out. As stage fog washes over the first rows of the theater, the massive, fully realized hull of the battleship appears with a shock, tilting under an angry orange sky.
From the murky waters — or is it from the otherworldly skies? — Demogorgons, the signature otherworldly monsters of “Stranger Things,” brutally feast on an officer amid desperate screams and rapid gunfire. Then, in a moment that elicited cheers at a recent preview, the title sequence of “Stranger Things” (the series) is projected onto a screen the width of the proscenium.
Dramaturgically, the scene is rooted in the Philadelphia Experiment, a conspiracy theory that’s long been a reference point for the Duffer Brothers. It posits that during World War II, an American ship traveled to another dimension after the U.S. government started experimenting with electromagnetic energy in its attempt to render ships invisible.
Some of the crew were said to have gone mad in the “jog across dimensions,” as the show’s playwright, Kate Trefry, put it.
In directing the cold open, Martin said he was inspired by the movie “Alien,” specifically “that moment of quiet in which you’re building suspense, which is all about what you don’t see.” He also pointed to a more theatrical and unusual source for a horror inspiration: The first minutes of “The Lion King” on Broadway, when life-size puppet animals parade down the aisles and onto the stage.
“It’s really punchy,” he said. “You never forget it.”
Much of the responsibility for painting a dramatic stage picture in so little time fell to Jamie Harrison and Chris Fisher, the illusions and visual effects designers. Harrison said that from the initial concept to the Broadway stage, the open — the “most complex sequence” he’s put onstage — took about two-and-a-half years to perfect.
About 40 crew members, including stage managers and dressers, “have been rehearsed to within a millisecond of their existence,” Harrison said, to help deploy some 75 cues that involve “a whole lot of engineering,” including pulley systems and automation technology, on Miriam Buether’s set.
Benjamin Pearcy, a video and visual effects designer, said one of the biggest challenges in making the ship appear out of nowhere was ensuring that audiences couldn’t tell the difference between the physical scenery and light that creates the illusion of space.
To do so, several projectors installed around the auditorium work in tandem with a massive upstage LED wall to toy with depth perception.
“We’re hiding where the real ship stops and where the extension of that ship is on the screen behind it,” he said.
There’s an entire set piece — a painted backdrop of an empty sky — that the audience sees for just seconds before it disappears, never to be seen again.
“The audience isn’t going to necessarily even remember that they saw that for a moment,” Pearcy said. “But if that hadn’t been there, the appearance of the ship itself would not be the dramatic moment that it is.”
Also at play is the retention of vision, a magic principle in which the magician flashes a coin in the light a second before it vanishes. The flash pushes the coin into the audience’s mind just before it’s gone and significantly heightens the effect.
In the opening scene, the principle is used with stage lighting to reinforce an empty space just before it is filled. Harrison, who has a background in magic, said that in that moment the audience “perceives more depth than perhaps there actually is.”
What kept — keeps — the designers up at night? Making sure the effects and illusions, the kinds of things you only need to get right once for television, work on Broadway eight shows a week. Gary Beestone, the show’s technical director, said the weight of the scenery presented structural challenges in the theater itself, which is inside the Marriott Marquis hotel and above a Levi’s store.
“We found that there was a beam in the store that we needed to access in order to sign off getting the show to work,” Beestone said.
Harrison said an unspecified “supermassive structure” that weighs about 1,300 pounds has to move safely and quickly.
“That’s about as much as I can say without being sued,” he added, laughing.
‘Driven by Character and by Story’
A “live spectacle event”: That’s how the Marquis marquee describes “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.” It’s a boast that the producers hope will drive word of mouth.
But it could also send the message that the show disfavors character development for “cheap thrills, expensively made,” as Houman Barekat put it when he reviewed the London production for The New York Times.
A writer also for the series, Trefry said the open strikes the same narrative balance as the rest of the show, between appealing to theatergoers who know nothing about the series and to “Stranger Things” aficionados eager for a glimpse of what may come in the show’s fifth and final season, which debuts later this year. (The play is based on an original story by Trefry, the Duffer Brothers and Jack Thorne.)
Martin sounded confident that the show would not be the kind where people say: “We’ve seen five magic tricks. When’s the next one?”
“What we do is driven by character and by story,” he said.
And by old-school theatermaking. Surprisingly, the Duffer Brothers sounded most animated when talking about a costume — just one way, Ross said, that the Broadway play is returning their baby to its humble first-season roots.
“The Demogorgon in Season 1 was a guy in a suit,” he said. “To go back to doing that? It’s a thrill.”
