Get the latest gossip
High School, Dramatically: Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Grief Camp
The great American unifier, put onstage at two vastly different scales.
Young Jim Hopper(Burke Swanson) is there — cop’s son, bad boy, smarter than advertised — and so is baby Bob Newby(Juan Carlos), projecting intense Gene Belcher energy as the founder of the school’s AV club and self-appointed DJ of its radio station (very useful for regular exposition updates). I could have done with fewer gags surrounding Alan — who checks all the tedious boxes, from going Method to speaking in indecipherable Cockney to appearing in an outfit that screams Cats — but there’s still something sweet about a project like The First Shadow, with all its commercial bulk and all the digital streaming in its DNA, paying nerdy, affectionate homage to its newly adopted form. Its devices for dealing with the passage of time — an obscure gong sound; the appearances of a guitarist (Alden Harris-McCoy) who seems more like a benign visitor from another dimension than what he is, an employee of the camp; hard cuts from night to day and back again — come off as a gestural mishmash, splashes of surreality for its own sake rather than reservoirs of meaning.
Or read this on VULTURE