Of all the elaborate illusions and wall-to-wall effects performed in the stage show “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” the trickiest one is a signature visual of the “Stranger Things” universe: the nosebleed.
“Making a nosebleed happen onstage is quite literally one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my entire existence,” said Jamie Harrison, who designed the play’s illusions and visual effects with Chris Fisher. “It was so hard. And we couldn’t just say, ‘Please, can we cut the nosebleed?’ Because it’s canon!”
“And it’s hard because, in the TV show, it’s just a sponge up the nose, you can literally wait until it starts dribbling and say ‘cut’ once you’re done,” added Fisher. “Ours have to bleed on demand.”
“Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” opening tonight on Broadway after a hit debut in London’s West End, is a prequel to the Duffer Brothers’ Netflix horror series that’s set in 1959 Hawkins, Ind., when Dr. Brenner is just getting his start in his lab and Bob Newby, Joyce Maldonado and Jim Hopper are in their last year of high school. A new student named Henry Creel arrives, as does a wave of shocking crimes around town.
Aidan Close and Emmet Smith in the North American tour of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”
(Matthew Murphy)
The exact narrative opposite happens to be “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” the tour of which is now playing at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre through June 22 and ends at Costa Mesa’s Segerstrom Center (July 5-25, 2026). The family-friend sequel takes place decades after J.K. Rowling’s final “Harry Potter” book and movie, with Harry, Ron and Hermione now parents of children enrolling in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Both of these Olivier-winning stage shows are new adventures set amid global phenomenons, complete with cameos by familiar faces and live renditions of mind-bending spectacles — albeit for very different narrative contexts and with drastically distinct audience impacts. And both Fisher, with experience in stage management, and Harrison, with training in classical acting, spent a spell of their childhood injured in the hospital and were each given a magic set to pass the time.
After collaborating on an early workshop of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the two joined forces to bring to life wand duels, transfiguration potions and the Mind Flayer. The Times spoke with Fisher and Harrison about creating within such well-known worlds, competing with the effects of film and TV and leaving illusions in the actors’ hands. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s most misunderstood about what you two do?
Harrison: Quite often, we’ll be described as illusionists, which are performers in the same way a pianist plays the piano. We are illusion designers, people with a magic background who make theater. And we’re not consultants either; we don’t just come in for 10 minutes and consult. We’re an embedded part of the creative team and, on both of these shows, we were there from the start of the development process of the script to add whatever theatricality we can to enhance the experience.
Fisher: Both of these shows have very developed worlds and mythologies, but every effect has been designed to serve the story, it’s not the story having to serve the effect. And we work directly with every single department in the production — wigs, wardrobe, automation, props, direction, music, sound, lighting, everyone — and it’s a huge collaboration from the very beginning. Everybody needs to get everything right for it to really sing; the difference between it being an amazing moment onstage and it being OK or embarrassing or awful is tiny.
Louis McCartney in “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.”
(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
Do you feel a pressure to compete with the effects in film, television and video, especially because these two titles are popular onscreen?
Harrison: I felt a huge pressure about that with “Harry Potter” at first. But then, the early audiences responded incredibly, and applauded and screamed when we wanted them to, because it’s live. What cinema and CGI can do is fantastic, and I love it, but when you see somebody vanish in front of your own eyes, subverting the laws of physics in the same room you’re sitting in, it’s thrilling. So we know from years of doing this now that the live experience is different — and equally powerful, if not more powerful — than the screen.
Fisher: The thing with “Back to the Future” [which I designed the illusions for] and “Harry Potter” is that there’s an expectation to re-create some moments from the movies; that car’s got to get to 88 miles per hour, they’ve got to go through that Platform 9 ¾. What’s fantastic is when we’ve got first-time theatergoers coming to these shows, people who’ve only seen the films and think that’s all the effects can be. When they see these live theater effects in front of them, it blows their minds, they’re enthused and want to come back to see more of this sort of thing. So we both treat it as an opportunity to match what they’ve seen, and try to make it even better.
A scene from the North American tour of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
(Matthew Murphy)
A majority of the “Harry Potter” illusions are executed by actors, who usually don’t have experience with magic. How does that work?
Harrison: Chris and I learned so much about creating stage illusions by performing close-up magic because you get to see the psychology of magic from an audience’s perspective by doing it one-on-one with people hundreds of times a day. So the key skill for our actors to learn is understanding where the audience is and isn’t looking at any moment. We never want the audience to see you getting ready for a magic trick, we want them to stay in the story and ride the emotional journey of the scene.
So there’s a whole set of skills that close-up magicians and stage magicians use that we’ve run with, and we give the cast an introduction to magic that covers a lot of those things…
Fisher: … sleight of hand, misdirection, various different forms of magic. We do it on the first day of rehearsals, and it’s to help them understand what they’re about to do in the show. Because a magic trick in the hands of a good magician — somebody who understands the psychology of how the moment works — can feel miraculous.
It’s intense — every day is critical because you’re always learning something new, from traps to flying to spells, and it’s only in the repetition of performing it again and again that you become better at it. Sometimes an incoming performer can’t quite tackle it the same way that a previous performer has, and they just find it really hard.
But our associates, who are assigned to each show, adapt the teaching of the illusions to the needs of the performers, because illusions have to feel natural to not appear contrived. Sometimes they end up doing it in a way that actually makes the effect better, and we take that back and integrate it into our other productions.
Matt Mueller, Ebony Blake and the company of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”
(Matthew Murphy)
Transferring “Stranger Things” from London to Broadway, or opening a “Harry Potter” production in another country or on tour, presents opportunities to adjust your designs. What are your priorities when doing so?
Harrison: It’s true. Everything we’re doing in a show, we’re being ambitious and trying things that haven’t been done before.
Fisher: And when we first create a show, we don’t know if these effects are going to work because they’re bespoke and totally brand new. We hope they do! So it’s always a joy to be able to do something a second time, especially with feedback from the actors who’ve been performing them.
Harrison: Every time it moves, it always changes slightly because we’ve been able to better understand the beats in some moments and tighten those up. We’re notorious for our standards, and every time we open “Harry Potter” in a new venue, we’ll ask people to sit in different parts of the theater, often at extreme angles, and shout out if we’re accidentally exposing anything.
Fisher: What’s brilliant for us is that, whenever “Harry Potter” has changed — going from two parts to one, and then getting cut even shorter — we’ve never lost any illusions. It really is more magic per minute because the show got shorter but the effects stayed the same.
Jamie Harrison, left, and Chris Fisher at “Stranger Things” premiere in London.
(Courtesy of Jamie Harrison)
Harrison: Bringing “Stranger Things” to Broadway, we’ve made some slight technical improvements on things and entirely redesigned other things so that the impact is significantly stronger than in London. And we’ve added a whole lot of new illusions in as well.
Fisher: After London, we did two more illusion workshops where we spoke with the writers and directors and looked at the whole show — the new beats or illusions we wanted to create, and the ways we could improve on what we had. And one of the things was blood. We learned from London that, in order for it to read as blood onstage, it has to be seen against a white fabric or there has to be a lot of it. The feedback was that there needed to be even more blood, so we’ve developed new ways of delivering the blood in the show, and we’re still improving that.
Harrison: I will say, making a nosebleed happen onstage is quite literally one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my entire existence. It was so hard. And we couldn’t just say, “Please, can we cut the nosebleed?” Because it’s canon!
Fisher: And it’s hard because, in the TV show, it’s just a sponge up the nose, you can literally wait until it starts dribbling and say “cut” once you’re done. Ours have to bleed on demand.
Harrison: We went through dozens of different ideas. We had all of these incredible automated nose units made with little actuators and all sorts of things. But sometimes, the answer is just to keep it simple.
A scene from “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.”
(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
With “Stranger Things” being of the horror genre, versus the family-friendly “Harry Potter,” how do you make illusions as scary as possible?
Harrison: We did a lot of research on various people’s approaches and understanding of what makes something scary, in order to determine what we wanted audiences’ experiences to be. There are some shows out there that only do jump scares — people love them. We love a good jump scare too and we’ve got some great ones in this show. But then there are other sequences where you want to build tension and a real sense of horror.
One scene that was tough was the Scary Patty sequence, where Patty turns into a monster. It’s now totally different to what we originally started with in London previews, and you can see in the documentary that it’s a real problem sequence at the time. We had this idea that her face would melt, and we worked with one of the best prosthetics companies in the world. We put it onstage and it just didn’t work. Even though it looked brilliant up close, you couldn’t really tell what was going on from more than six meters away.
And these flaps of skin were dropping down, and it became more funny than scary. That’s the line you want to walk with horror: You’ve got to push it so far that the audience has a response to it, but not cross that line where you lose the fear factor. In a couple of previews in New York, we pushed it a little too far, but thankfully, the other night’s show report read, “Scary Patty: audience gasps and screams, and ends with a round of applause.”
Fisher: Another initial idea for Scary Patty was that she’d start bleeding all over, with patches of blood appearing on her dress. Honestly, we spent almost the entire rehearsal period trying to make blood come through — we went through different fabrics, different pumps for the blood — and it was absolute carnage. It was so stressful. We didn’t get the blood to reliably seep through the fabric in time for it to be a stage effect. You think it would be straightforward, but it was so hard! We’re both quite resilient and doggedly determined to keep going, but that was one thing where we had to just say: We’re cutting that idea, but we’ve got two others.
What advice would you give to playwrights who want to write effects into their work?
Harrison: Go for it, and let your imagination run wild. Theater is a dynamic environment for imaginative people to do cool things, and audiences will opt in. We always tell the writers we work with, “Don’t ask us, ‘Can you do this?’ Write the most amazing thing you want to see. It’s our job to try to put that onstage. And even if you haven’t got a multimillion-pound budget, a good illusion designer will come up with another way of doing it.
Fisher: Remember that illusion techniques can enhance the theatrical experience, heighten an emotion or elevate a particular moment. So think outside the box, don’t be complacent or feel pigeonholed that you have to write in a bunch of magic tricks. You can go much bigger than that.
A scene from “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.”
(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
