Stranger Things: The First Shadow had quite the surprise in store for Friday night’s audience at the Marquis Theatre in New York City.
Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays Henry Creel a.k.a. Vecna in Seasons 4 and 5 of the series, made his Broadway debut to replace Louis McCartney in the final scene of the stage play. The moment connects the live show directly to the flagship Netflix series, depicting a moment that viewers immediately recognize from the fourth season: Henry meeting young Eleven in the Rainbow Room at Hawkins Lab.
In the scene, Henry takes Eleven’s hand and promises to help her. Audiences, of course, know that plan doesn’t exactly pan out how Henry hopes it will, and his eventual falling out with Eleven serves as the catalyst for the entire series. The Netflix series explains the backstory between Eleven and Henry in Season 4, Episode 7, “The Massacre at Hawkins Lab.”
The swap served as a fun way to bring the story full circle ahead of the final installments of the Netflix series. Stranger Things 5 Vol. 2 debuts on Christmas Day, and the finale follows a week later on New Year’s Eve.
That is the only scene in the stage play that comes directly from the series, as most of the show seeks to fill in some of the gaps about Henry’s backstory after he moves to Hawkins in 1959.
While The First Shadow doesn’t provide much completely new information about Henry (playwright Kate Trefry had to walk a narrow line as to not make the final season inaccessible to Stranger Things viewers who couldn’t make it to see the play), it does give some helpful context about what the character had gone through before we met him in Stranger Things 4.
Season 5 also includes a few callbacks to the play, including a scene in Vol. 1 where Max (Sadie Sink), while trapped in Henry’s mindscape, wanders into a memory from Hawkins High School in 1959 as a young Joyce Byers tries to publicize the school’s performance of the musical Oklahoma!
McCartney has played Henry Creel since The First Shadow debuted on West End in 2023, making his own Broadway debut this year when the play opened at the Marquis Theatre.
