One of Netflix’s most popular shows now has an eye-popping Broadway prequel — Stranger Things: The First Shadow, now playing at New York’s Marquis Theatre. The play tells the origin story of Henry Creel, the young man with telepathic abilities who becomes the first of nearly a dozen children to be experimented upon by the U.S. government. Through various circumstances, Henry eventually transforms into the series antagonist Vecna, the disfigured and sinister overlord of the parallel dimension known as the Upside Down. The show serves up a lot of big moments, including an opening featuring the battleship from the Philadelphia Experiment, a climactic showdown in which Creel levitates above a catwalk, and a massive rendering of a Mind Flayer that descends above the audience from the proscenium arch. It also features younger versions of familiar Stranger Things characters like Joyce Byers (before she took the married name Maldonado), Dr. Martin Brenner and officer Jim Hopper (long before he became Sheriff).
Tony and Olivier Award-winning sound designer Paul Arditti — who got an Olivier nomination here and was up for another Tony this month — tackled this beast of a show, which required a very cinematic approach and major coordination between multiple departments. Although The First Shadow has been playing in London’s West End for a year and a half, Arditti reveals that this version is different than its UK counterpart. The play went through numerous workshops and rehearsals overseas, and revisions have continued from there (the opening in London) to here (the rehearsals in New York). He says the Broadway iteration is shorter, has improved special effects, highly modified sound design, greater wing space, and a new musical dream sequence. With the exception of star Louis McCartney, the cast on Broadway is all Americans.
No Easy Task
In total, Arditti spent a cumulative year working on the show including five months in New York. He reports that the show’s writer Kate Trefry never stopped rewriting, so he was constantly catching up. He adds that almost none of the original sound design came to the U.S. without modification or replacement, and that it’s the most intensive job he has ever undertaken.
The First Shadow kicks off with the military attempting to render a battleship invisible and teleport it, resulting in them journeying into the Upside Down and facing its demonic denizens. The sequence is bold, flashy, and thunderous, and it gears the audience up for a wild ride.
“In general, the show is a balance of what we want to achieve, versus time and space,” Arditti tells FRONT of HOUSE. “By time and space, I mean the time it takes to make something disappear or appear onstage, and the space that exists backstage to move it to or from. What you now see in that opening sequence is the hundredth iteration of our attempt to shave a second or two from the scene changes, and to focus the audience on an exact thing at an exact time. The way we achieve this varies from moment to moment. Sometimes the sound takes over the story, sometimes the video or lighting, sometimes a special effect and sometimes the actors. As a rule, in these complex sequences, the ‘go’ button on QLab will trigger lighting and video in sync with the sound effect. It’s an interconnected web of cues, and I guess the most difficult thing is unpicking it to make changes.”
Many of the sound effects from the series were ported over into the play. Arditti wanted as many recognizable sounds from the show as they could squeeze in, and these included “the curious gurgling of the demogorgons, the creepy clock, and, my personal favorite, the glassy sound of Joyce’s fairy lights from Season One,” he elaborates. “That last sound turns up in various places in the show including Brenner’s lab.”
A Little More Horror, Please
Given that the series has many horror elements within its ’80s milieu, there was an edict to have some here. There are three in total in The First Shadow, and Arditti says they originally started off in a small way, being quieter and less intense. But the series creators the Duffer Brothers encouraged the stage team to make the show scarier and have the jump scares be bigger events. Arditti notes that “given that it’s usually me who questions [director] Stephen Daldry and [co-director] Justin Martin about whether something is gratuitous or overdone, I think we’ve got the scary moments fairly well-grounded in the story now.”
In preparation for the original London production, Arditti re-watched the series, sometimes listening to it without the screen imagery so he could concentrate on its sound design. He says that horror aficionado Trefry regularly showed the UK team YouTube clips of horror film references that informed her work. “My approach was to take the TV series as ground zero — I wanted to stay as close to that as possible,” Arditti recalls. “I am also fascinated by the era of our show — the late 1950s — and the technology and politics of that time. A lot of my research centered on what was going on 65 years ago with electric and electronic musical instruments, radio, TV, audio, and surveillance technology.”
EFX to the Rescue
Vocal processing was needed for the eerier moments on stage, including how Henry Creel had the monster Vecna slowly growing inside of him. But Arditti did want to resort to recorded, pre-processed material. “We were very lucky to be supported by Joshua Kohl Hegmann, who looks after Netflix’s audio assets, who gave me the Pro Tools session and plug-ins used in the TV show to create the voice of Vecna,” Arditti says. “While the processing wasn’t immediately transferable to the live context, we spent some weeks working with our Henry Creel, Louis McCartney, to find a way of combining his voice with the effects. The result was a tightly scripted coordination — when he turns into Vecna, Louis changes his voice to a low growl, and at the exact same syllable, we push a fader containing the modified Vecna FX chain. The combination gives us the richness and depth of Vecna, whilst maintaining the vocal clarity vital in the theater.”
The show does feature one lively musical number involving high school students, and there is intermittent atmospheric music by composer D.J. Walde that emulates the synthwave-flavored score of the series while standing on its own. But it’s a play, not a musical, so these elements are placed judiciously.
The Gear
Stranger Things: The First Shadow is run on a DiGiCo SD7 Quantum with approximately 160 inputs. The actors are miked with Sennheiser MKE-1s. The audio system predominately includes Meyer Leopard, Lina, and the “truly amazing” 2100-LFC speakers. After working on the London production, Arditti debated with his associates Chris Reid and Rob Bettle whether they should use an all-d&b audiotechnik system on Broadway to take advantage of Soundscape with trackers on the actors. His recent design for Guys and Dolls at the Bridge in London used this system, and he did use some d&b product here (mainly various E-series speakers and D-series amps).
“I eventually went with the Meyer speakers, and a more old-school approach to zoning,” he says. “It was a tricky decision to make, but given the inevitable space restrictions at FOH in a show where a massive and terrifying Mind Flayer emerges from the proscenium itself, the Meyer kit fitted the bill more closely. The current generation of Meyer theater speakers has extraordinary power, very even HF dispersal, and an amazing linearity across its dynamic range, in a very compact form factor.”
Cues… Lots of Cues
There are more than 400 sound cues, and Arditti states that the closest collaboration with his team is between sound and video. The show implements a lot of video design from 59 Productions through projection, the LED wall, and a few discreet screens. “There was constant communication with the video department,” he says, “beginning with filming a click-tracked mo-cap sequence — a first for me — through experimentation with effects and ideas in workshops and in previews, to finding a way to play video in the theater fluidly and in sync with sound, special effects, and automation. Together with Miriam Buether’s team we came up with the ‘void’ sequence, which is the pattern of moving red horizontal lines each time Henry or Patty shift from reality into another world. The red lines provide a time structure for a scene change, a cue for the actors, a signal to the audience, and a way of hiding a lot of magic.”
Arditti says this particular moving image became stronger and more meaningful once the right sound was found for it. He adds that, inversely, certain sounds gained their power with the appropriate images created by the show’s video designers Benjamin Pearcy and Leo Warner. During the production process, the video and sound teams constantly exchanged video clips, sound effects tracks, and music passages to achieve these strong couplings.
“My associate Chris Reid took on the job of creating layers of sound effects to go with all the ‘frontcloth’ video,” Arditti adds. “He did a brilliant job. These sequences were perpetually being changed and improved, and every time this happened Chris had to rework the sound effects to be frame accurate to the new images.”
The most difficult sequence for Arditti to design in The First Shadow was when Henry Creel’s mother Virginia — who is afraid of her son’s terrifying powers and sees him as a murderous threat — turns him over to manipulative government stooge Dr. Brenner. In retaliation, Henry conjures up the Mind Flayer to exact revenge against Brenner. This moment in the show had many elements and variables that needed to be controlled. The sound designer noted that the actors needed to have very accurate timing and positioning to make the special effects work around them and then be removed fluidly.
“The automated Virginia puppet is programmed to break on a cue from the sound computer,” Arditti explains. “Sound, lighting, video, and automation have to stay in sync with the bone-break sequence. The whole Mind Flayer section is also quite complicated, being made up of a large number of discreet movements, all of which are separately operated and monitored closely for safety, and which must stay in sync with the sound and music cues.”
Arditti praises scenic design supervisor Ed Pierce whom he said coordinated all of the design elements from every department for the Marquis and invented the current stage incarnation of the Mind Flayer. He calls him a genius and indispensable to this production.
Stranger Things: The First Shadows feels very immersive. Arditti says that his usage of surround sound was no different than on any other show he has worked on. His personal edict is to have surround be supportive and not distracting to the audience unless a specific sound is being located within the venue.
“That said, this is a show with a lot of sound and music, some of it quite loud, so I upgraded the surrounds from my usual specification, with more power handling, home runs for every speaker, and more subs,” he says. “We are lucky at the Marquis — rigging speakers in the auditorium where I wanted them is fairly straightforward. We also learned during previews that we could be bolder than I had originally thought with the surrounds without losing focus. It was a lot of fun to find the new limits.”
The Broadway production of Stranger Things: The First Shadows continues through November 2025 at New York’s Marquis Theatre.
