Review: The Stranger Things Play Documentary Highlights the Pain and Pressure of Making Theater

When first announced last month, I expected Netflix’s documentary about Stranger Things: The First Shadow’s journey to the stage to be a blasé puff-piece to hype up the production’s Broadway bow at the Marquis Theatre. What emerges instead in the 90-minute film is an unflinching appraisal of the sheer tenacity and terror required to take a big-budget production to the West End. It’s also essential viewing for anyone who loves the theater.

First Shadow writer Kate Trefry, producer Sonia Friedman, and directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin are refreshingly candid about the relentless drive required to steer a behemoth production, all while an entertainment giant like Netflix is expecting results.

The realities of the breakneck creative process are mapped out with painstaking detail. Early on, Trefry gets a call to say that “80 percent” of a scene has to be taken out because it didn’t align with plans for the Stranger Things television series. She’d already thrashed out “25, 35” different versions of a script at that point.

As the show slides from rehearsals into tech, the abstract becomes the tangible. Problems like misbehaving prop corpses and missing animatronic spiders start to cause headaches. Cast member Christopher Buckley sums it up as a mix of “joyful exuberance and painful, painful, aggravated boredom.” Daldry describes the gantry climax of the piece as a “fucking nightmare.”

Friedman also openly admits to a conundrum with many parties “urging her, begging her to cancel the first preview” in order to help refine the show. She holds her nerve, while Daldry states he is driven by “the white heat of anxiety. The white heat of stress.”

Then previews begin. The show isn’t finished, but it’s enough to be seen by a a guinea pig audience that can inform creative decisions and spur the team to make drastic alterations. Friedman describes the “chorus of coughs” that begins to emerge when an audience loses their patience. Twenty minutes is cut. Scenes are rewritten. Lines are learned with hours’ notice. One shot sees Martin and the cast gathered in a stairwell rehearsing lines for a brand new scene, melding together two other moments.

As the preview process continues and nerves mount, the cameras themselves begin to feel intrusive, interlopers in a febrile space. “Spycam,” Trefry describes them at one point, with the interviewer remarking upon a “fucking weird vibe” descending upon the Phoenix Theatre in London. A member of the show’s ensemble has to warn a camera operator that he’s about to be right in the path of a big ensemble huddle backstage. The cabin fever sets in. Trefry is ready to kill darlings: “act two is long. It feels long. It feels boring.”

Of course, we all know that the show has a happy ending with WhatsOnStage Awards, Olivier Awards, a Broadway transfers, and box office success. The five stars showered down on the show with reckless abandon. But the documentary is an important reminder that success doesn’t fall into one’s lap. Every creative endeavor does, and should require sweat, grit, patience, and the ability to trust in a collective in order to make results. Stranger Things: The First Shadow is a gigantic, simultaneous leap of faith, a group of creatives leaping into the unknown and catching one another.

It’s also nice, as a member of the theater press, to see a producer like Friedman highlight the key role that critics play in welcoming shows to the West End and Broadway. Reviews are a vital part of an opening process, and the appraisal can be the difference between a make or break. In a time when theater press is being eroded from all sides, it’s an important reminder of the custodian-esque role that journalists can play.