How Stranger Things Broadway Play First Shadow Connects to Season 5

There’s a moment in Netflix’s behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of the streamer’s new “Stranger Things” play in which the majority of a conversation between the play’s director and playwright is bleeped out because it includes too many spoilers about the hit TV series’ upcoming fifth and final season.

It serves as a not-so-subtle response to anyone who had doubts that “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” was a necessary piece of “Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer’s master plan for the Upside Down.

But the Duffers will be the first to tell you that, though the show is an integral part of the “Stranger Things” mythology heading into the final season, it wasn’t their idea. It wasn’t even Netflix’s. It was famed director Stephen Daldry’s.

“It didn’t come from Netflix. It wasn’t Netflix’s idea. This was Stephen’s idea,” Matt Duffer said during a Q&A following a screening of “Behind the Curtain: Build the World of ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow” on Monday. “Stephen was the one who had to push it and make it happen. He was passionate about it and I think that’s the key. You have something like this, you can have people just churning out stuff to make money and using the name, but that’s obviously not what this was. This was Stephen fighting to make this happen.”

Daldry approached the Duffers with his idea to make a “Stranger Things” play after “Stranger Things” aired its second season in 2017. The Duffers were shocked “The Crown” director and producer had interest at all — and further confused when he explained this wasn’t a musical (as was many people’s, including the Duffers’, first thought when they hear Broadway). It was a sci-fi/horror play that would genuinely scare its audience in the same way the TV series does.

Enter legendary West End and Broadway producer Sonia Friedman, director Justin Martin, and “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” playwright Kate Trefry, who has been a writer on the “Stranger Things” TV series since Season 2. The Duffers helped sketch out the initial idea and made sure it was canon in their larger story for the TV show, but aside from notes here and there throughout the process, they entrusted the finer details of “First Shadow” — the origin story of “Stranger Things” big bad Henry Creel/Vecna — to Daldry, Friedman and Trefry. And that trio had the task of making sure everything in “First Shadow” worked as both a standalone play, and as a bridge between Seasons 4 and 5 of “Stranger Things.”

“I was writing the play and writing Season 5 at the same time, and so to me, they’re just two pieces of a whole, and they’re inextricable from each other,” Trefry said. “And I think that the experience of consuming both together is going to be really fun and satisfying to see how connected they are.”

They’re so connected that the Duffers were sending notes on changes made to the series finale to Trefry during her multiple rewrites of the initial version of the play, which debuted on the West End in December 2023. It ended up winning two Olivier Awards for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play and Best Set Design.

“Part of the challenge, and I think what you’re seeing in that [behind-the-scenes doc], is Kate was doing Season 5 with us, but at a certain point, [she was] just doing this while we were filming, and then we were working on finale stuff,” Ross Duffer said. “And as Matt and I were doing the finale, stuff was changing and everything was evolving in real time. And I think that’s what made it the biggest challenge because, as we got to script, we realized we needed to change things and that affected the play, but they were in the middle of doing the play. It was very close, the timing was a few weeks before the play opened.”

Now the play is opening again, this time with even more rewrites, at the Marquis Theater in New York. Some serve to clarify story points and others are due to technical changes and scaling up production for Broadway — but some are just for extra fun, like a nod to Netflix’s iconic “Watch Credits” or “Next Episode…” option, which flashes up on the stage’s LED screen just before curtain call at the end of the show.

“What you’ll see in the documentary is that we basically ran out of time in London,” “First Shadow” producer Friedman told Variety. “And that wasn’t manufactured for the documentary, we genuinely ran out of time in London. We loved what we did in London, but we knew we had a stop-dead date to start performances and to open the show. And we knew that the work was going to have to continue after we opened in London, and that’s because you do learn a lot in front of an audience, and you can see the technical, physical demands and how ambitious it is technically. It was impossible, once we put it on the stage, to do very big changes, it was just technically impossible. So we sort of banked everything we were learning through the London experience, through the London previews, and changed what we could but we knew that there was a journey that was ongoing.”

Friedman says that while the London version is “still brilliant,” it’s “very different,” and put on in a theater that’s half the size of the Marquis.

“The set was all built again. There were effects that we brought over, in terms of how we designed it. But everything was built again,” Friedman said. “As we call it ‘the gantry’ — one of the final effects — that was from London, in terms of that effect. Many were. The Mind Flayer that comes out into the auditorium is very different to London, that was built here just for New York. We thought we could go bigger, and we certainly did”

And, while Netflix won’t disclose exactly how much it spent on producing “The First Shadow” — first for the West End and now all over again for Broadway — it certainly wasn’t cheap. But Netflix has a good shot at recouping their expenses through ticket sales and the exclusive merch fans can buy only at “The First Shadow.” Netflix vice president of consumer products Josh Simon likes to call these products (one of which is only sold beginning at intermission so as not to spoil specific plot points in the first act) “artifacts” rather than “souvenirs.”

“It starts with Matt and Ross Duffer being huge fans of entertainment merchandise. And they have been their whole lives, like, they still are very proud of their t-shirt collection that they’ve amassed over the years of collecting,” Simon says, adding the play is “such a fun opportunity to create the things that you can only get in the theater.” “And it really rewards fans who are excited enough to go to the show,” he said.

“Stranger Things: The First Shadow” might be Netflix’s first Broadway play, but it’s far from its first live experience. The company has been focused on growing that branch of its business for the past three years, reporting more than 40 unique experiences to date and reached 7.5 million fans across 170 openings in 100 cities around the world. Those include “Squid Game: The Experience,” “The Queen’s Ball: A Bridgerton Experience,” “Stranger Things: The Experience,” restaurants Netflix Bites LA and Netflix Bites Vegas. Soon, Netflix will open two permanent locations for in-person entertainment and experiences called Netflix House; one in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and the other in Galleria Dallas in Texas.

“We’re about telling great stories, and that can happen in so many mediums,” Simon said when asked about the potential for other Netflix IPs to make their way to Broadway and the West End. “We’re always looking for ways to get fans closer to the world and characters they love. Theater is definitely one element of that. The experiences, the restaurant are other examples. And I’ll just say that we’re always looking for new ways to bring new stories to life.”

For now, you’re definitely going to need to head to the theater to get the story because Netflix does not have plans to stream “The First Shadow.”

“From a visual effects standpoint and a production design standpoint, we’re doing things that I think are pretty groundbreaking and haven’t been done before,” Simon said. “There’s just a real visceral reaction that people have from the intense jump scares to really laugh out loud, light hearted humor and even some musical numbers in between. It’s a unique experience and we’ve designed it really to be a unique theater going experience. And that’s where our focus is.”

As a prequel to “Stranger Things,” “The First Shadow” features teenage versions of Joyce (played by Winona Ryder on the TV series), Hopper (David Harbour’s character) and Bob Newby (played by Sean Astin), as well as multiple callbacks to the TV series. And, at its center, it is a love story between Henry Creel (played in “First Shadow” by Louis McCartney, who originated the part on the West End) and Patty Newby (a new character for the stage play, portrayed by Gabrielle Nevaeh).

“One of the tricks of this whole process was trying to create something that could stand on its own as a unique story, but also relate back to everything that came before, and also speak to the future episodes in the final season,” Trefry told Variety. “But also make something that you didn’t have to see in order to understand Season 5. At times it felt like it was a catch-22, and I like to think that we thread that needle as best we could. But it’s obviously my sincere wish for everybody to see all of it, for everyone to see every episode and the and the play and to have the most fun viewing experience because it’s all interwoven.”

But whether Patty will be included as a character in the upcoming fifth and final season of “Stranger Things” when it debuts later this year, Trefry says: “That’s something that I’m not at liberty to disclose.”

Friedman takes pride in the stat that more than 70% of “The First Shadow” audience members are first-time theatergoers, and that’s solely based on the West End performance and Broadway previews ahead of opening night Tuesday. If that interest can hold, it will determine how long the show runs, something Friedman isn’t willing to bet on yet.

“That’s an impossible question to answer,” Friedman said. “But no producer or creative team puts this amount of work and time and love into a project, which we have been developing now for many years,” Friedman said. “We first started talking about this in 2018 and it’s now 2025. We haven’t created this in order to only run it for a few weeks. We believe we should be here a little while. But we’re having this conversation a few days before the opening. So let’s have this conversation in six months time.”

As for Trefry, she has no plans to pen any more scripts — theatrical or otherwise — until she’s had a break to recover from “First Shadow.”

“I know there’s some crazy rumors floating around that this is the first part of a trilogy which I cannot confirm or deny. No, I’m denying it,” Trefry promised.