I recently saw Stranger Sings on tour, and if you’re wondering if it’s any good, I can confirm I found it a bit more upside down rather than right side up.
The story follows the events of the first season of Stranger Things pretty closely, but I think also dipped into some aspects of season 2, and potentially season 3. I’ll be honest, when I saw this show was on, I was very excited as I’d consider myself a fan of the Stranger Things series on Netflix, but this didn’t quite do it for me.
My favourite part of the show was a running gag where Eleven needed a tissue for when her nose bleeds and ends up putting it into Dustin’s mouth. That was great and they did it twice, and it needed a third time payoff.
The show was enjoyable in a lot of ways, but as is often the case with parodies, I was given the sense that this was written by people that hated Stranger Things more than liked it. I’m sure the creators of the show must actually like Stranger Things, and maybe they love it, but to qualify for something to be a parody rather than an adaptation, there are certain things you have to do, and usually that is take the piss out of the source material. Here they did it by being goofy and rarely clever.
The story features the same few kids who are nerds playing Dungeons and Dragons in their mum’s basement, and the youngest amongst them goes missing, taken by some sinister force into the Upside Down…which is a parallel world literally underneath us where the world is upside down.
We saw the show at the Wyvern Theatre in Swindon, and I think there may have been an audio issue at the start as I found the opening number difficult to hear the lyrics. This may have set them off on the wrong foot as it then meant all we had to go on were the visuals of the routine. Instantly it became apparent that Will, the child who goes missing, was played by a puppet. Now, this could be seen as clever as the show had a limited cast with actors playing multiple roles at times, but when I saw the puppet my reaction was ‘oh no.’ If done right this maybe could have been good, but it didn’t land at all for me.
The actress playing Joyce, who is Winona Ryder’s character form the show, actually was reasonably good, but the script didn’t work for me as much as I’d have liked. They were making jokes of her smoking loads and she was literally puffing multiple cigarettes at once at the same rate Garfield the cat eats lasagne. It was too over the top.
Then there was a song which very much focussed on the character Joyce being played by Winona Ryder, and had cameo characters based on Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands in the routine. This had nothing to do with Stranger Things, and I get it…it was to justify the show as a parody. But when it feels like it’s dumping on the show and it’s cast, I feel they got it wrong.
Now, maybe it just didn’t work for me, and although the theatre wasn’t super full, they did get a bunch of laughs here and there. I liked the idea that Hopper was about to get into an emotional song about having lost his daughter, but gets cut off a couple of times. The payoff between him and Eleven when they realise she could be his new daughter and he could be her dad was really funny and they played the moment perfectly.
There were a bunch of kids in the audience, and I started to think maybe it was more targeted at them, as they certainly got more out of it than many of the adults there.
The characters of Hopper, Eleven and Steve Harrington…Steve Harrington…were well done, but the main boys who are the central characters in the show felt more underused in this. A woman was playing Lucas, and that worked fine, but does change the dynamic of the boys not being able to talk to girls…but truthfully I’m not sure if the character was now female or not.
The show put far too much emphasis on the character of Barbara, who famously was killed off early in the show much to fans annoyance. I feel like you can date when this was written to the few weeks that the internet cared enough to want justice for Barbara. In this version her character ended up having a huge routine long after the character wasn’t in the story it was parodying, and they did a weird thing where she was having a relationship with the demogorgon. I mean, why not. At this stage they were putting in references to the musical Wicked for no reason, so I figure it was anything goes.
I’m aware the show has been successful and got lots of good reviews elsewhere, but it didn’t hit the mark for me. I believe there is a good show in here, and genuinely would love to give notes to the creative team of what I felt worked or didn’t…but I guess they may not want that considering it’s successful, so who am I to say I know better?
I feel the cast were capable, but that the nature of making it as parody as they could just meant it went over the top and was silly. Mad scientists cackling as loud as they can, may be fine for a panto, but didn’t serve well as a comedic version of Stranger Things.
If you have kids who like Stranger Things they’ll probably eat this up, but if you’re an adult who liked the nostalgic feel that the Stranger Things show gave you of the 1980s, The Goonies, or sci-fi and monster movies of the era, just limit your expectations.
