Pay attention to the posters lining the walls of Tube stations, and at least half of the stage shows will be adaptations of existing media: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Dirty Dancing, Only Fools and Horses, Pretty Woman, Moulin Rouge! Even Spitting Image and SpongeBob SquarePants are now being made into musicals. These are part of a long tradition of taking a successful story from the screen and placing it – often with a celebrity – centre stage. It’s an easy choice for investors in a risky market – a big-name show provides a hook that pretty much guarantees an audience.
The latest property making the leap from the screen to the theatre is Stranger Things: The First Shadow, a play that will bring the monster-riven world of Hawkins and the Upside Down to the stage of the Phoenix theatre, promising to take the audience to a “whole new dimension”. But does the West End really need another adaptation?
