Stranger Things: The First Shadow Review! Patti Newby Is The Freshest Face
By Caroline Cao | April 23, 2025 | Celebrity & Culture
Stranger Things: The First Shadow is a stage show for fans of the Netflix show. This is both an advantage and a weakness.
For one, it got a blank check for sci-fi-horror visuals that a Broadway production can only dream of. A theater person with no experience may be enthralled by the effects but befuddled by the muddle of context, which is all clumped and cluttered beneath the spectacular fireworks. Even the Stranger Things fan in me was let down by all the nostalgia flood that nearly hazed the character development.
But what does work about the Stranger Things play, directed by Stephen Daldry, who seems to puzzle over fleshing out the drama, is that it has an anchor, one beyond the TV show, in the introduction of a charming Patty Newby (Gabrielle Nevaeh).
Remember Bob Newby in the show, as played by Sean Astin? Patty is an exclusive character for the stage show. She also has an interesting backstory: She’s an adoptee under the thumb of her domineering father, Andrew Hovelson.
As this staging is a prequel, when the Stranger Things main cast’s parents were teens, enter Henry Creel (Louis McCartney, who originated the role in the West End), the powerful boy who would eventually become the series’ five-season-long lead antagonist, played by Jaime Campbell Bower.
When his family moves from Nevada to escape his past, Henry makes a connection with Patty, a girl who dreams that her birth mother is Ella Fitzgerald. And with his powers, he also decides to help her find her mother, but creepy supernatural shenanigans plague the journey.
One of the stronger scenes in the play is Henry and Patty imagining the overstimulation of Las Vegas, and it’s one of the few scenes that feels like it earnestly engages in these two characters’ psychology, since it’s unfortunate that the rest of Henry’s own story ends up trafficking in spectacle rather than psychological explorations.
A hurricane of illusion work and practical effects, sometimes at the expense of comprehensible drama, Stranger Things: The First Shadow will generate buzz, though it ultimately traffics in fan service and nostalgia buttons. One thing that does work in the show, aside from the teenage banter and dark comedy, as well as a raucous portrait of The Play That Goes Horribly Wrong, is Patty. You do genuinely care if Patty gets out okay.
Photo credit: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
