The two best lines of dialogue in Stranger Things: The First Shadow are delivered by the same character. The vessel? Patty Newby, adoptive sister of beloved Stranger Things season 2 character Bob Newby, played by 19-year-old emerging star Gabrielle Nevaeh.
Nevaeh expertly commands the stage, yielding to the optimistic, fighting spirit of Patty with such expertise you'd be shocked to learn that the Stranger Things prequel production was her Broadway debut. A striking example of her skill is in the way she delivers these two drastically different lines with matching levels of burning sincerity. The first is said to comfort a despondent Henry Creel, the second said in defense of his humanity:
“What you hate about yourself isn't a mistake — it's a miracle.” And…
“The U.S. government can go to hell!”
Patty Newby is Hawkins, Indiana's newest heroine, a beautifully complex (and canon) character who seeks acceptance, love, and above all, the truth.
“Those are my two favorite [lines] as well, actually, because those are the two that get the most audience reaction,” Nevaeh laughs. “When we do have that tender moment between Henry and Patty, it's the defining moment of their relationship. It's how they both feel about each other. Henry's never had somebody call him miracle, and Patty's certainly never had anybody call her a miracle.”
Set in 1959, Stranger Things: The First Shadow follows Patty and the teen versions of Bob, Hopper, and Joyce as they try to unravel the mysterious and terrifying occurrences that begin to plague Hawkins as soon as Henry Creel moves into town.
The stage production first ran on London's West End in December 2023 and transferred to Broadway this spring, with the New York City opening night on April 22. The show is sweeping, immersive, and downright horrific, giving audiences a taste of what the fifth and final season of Stranger Things might have in store. First Shadow expands upon the backstory we're given on Vecna (aka One, aka Henry Creel) near the end of season 4, revealing more of how the boy came to become the violent supervillain we fear him as in the current timeline of the show.
Patty Newby is the trigger for the majority of the action and plot of the show — but Nevaeh has been preparing for a moment like this her entire career. Originally from Miramar, Florida, the actress moved to L.A. when she was 12 to become a star; soon enough, she would star in Nickelodeon's All That revival and their hit sitcom That Girl Lay Lay, the first show on the network to feature two Black female leads, and lend her voice to animated series like Monster High and Curses!
“Nickelodeon was a really great journey for me. I learned so much about performing and so much about how to handle myself in front of an audience,” Nevaeh says. “I wouldn't change anything about how it all went down.”
A few days before the opening night of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Gabrielle Nevaeh caught up with Teen Vogue to unpack her path from Nickelodeon to Broadway, her “emotional umbilical cord” to Patty Newby, representation onstage, and the agonizing yet rewarding process of entering the Stranger Things universe.
Gabrielle Nevaeh: I can't believe we're getting [close to] opening night. It feels like this whole time period just flew by. Now we're getting up on the one-year anniversary of my actual audition process, so it's crazy to think that a year ago this time, I was still in Los Angeles, still auditioning, not knowing if I had the part or not, and now I'm about to make my Broadway debut with Stranger Things: The First Shadow.
But this whole preview period has been intense. It's been long, but it's been fun. It's been interesting to get that relationship with the audience, that understanding [that] each night, every audience is going to be different, each audience takes on a personality. One night we had a really goofy audience, and then we had a really tired audience. It's just been a learning process for me, and it's been a true gift.
GN: It's crazy! I auditioned for Stranger Things: The First Shadow just as auditioning practice because during that time, we were just leaving the SAG strike and television and film projects were still slowly coming out. I got the audition for Stranger Things: The First Shadow, and I was like, there's no way that I'm ever going to book a Broadway show, so let's just audition for fun. Maybe the Duffer Brothers will see it and they'll consider me for something else — but definitely not this. So I just did my best, I treated it as a film and television audition. I wasn't too sure how to go about a theatrical audition. I had never auditioned for theater before.
Then two weeks later, I got called back in Los Angeles, and they asked me to come back day after day that week to read with different boys and perform for [directors] Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, and Kate Trefry, the writer.
And then I waited a really, really long time. It was just silence. It went from hearing back every day to just… nothing. About a month later, they were like, "Hey, we want you to come to the final callback in New York, but we don't know who all is going to be there. We don't know what this is going to look like." So, I flew in and it ended up being a seven-hour callback. I was there from noon to 7:00 p.m. They gave me a lunch break, which I've never had before for an audition. And the rest was history.
GN: It was crazy. It was crazy. I mean, looking back on it, they were definitely trying to test my stamina. We have those days now, where you're on stage for eight to 10 hours doing the same thing over and over again.
That audition was definitely the hardest thing that I've ever done because they would give you these sides, these scripts of different scenes to do, but they wouldn't tell you which scene that you were doing every time you would enter the room. So, it was like playing Uno with the scene: pick a card, any card! You just had to be on your toes.
Growing up, I was a really shy kid. In middle school, I went to a performing arts school and I had this musical theater teacher that would make me get up in front of the class and sing this song, “I've Got Rhythm” by Judy Garland. It was his cruel way of [being like], this is what you don't do, because I would get up there and I would start to get nervous [and] shake and sway back and forth. I would be the example for the class of what not to do in an audition.
And for Stranger Things: The First Shadow, I had to sing. I didn't know what to sing for a musical theater audition, so, I was like, you know what? Wouldn't it be cool if I use the same song that was essentially my lemon when I was a kid and turn it into my lemonade? And by chance maybe, hopefully book this project? And that's what I did: I used the song that was used to embarrass me in middle school to book my first Broadway show.
GN: I was a mega fan of Stranger Things. I grew up watching the show. The first season came out when I was probably about nine or 10. I was such a fan that we actually didn't watch it on Netflix because we were latecomers to the whole streaming service thing, so we found the DVDs in Target and have hard copies of the first two seasons. I waited 12 hours in line once to meet Millie Bobby Brown when I was 16. I went to every fan experience possible. Anything that I could get my hands on merchandise-wise, I have it.
It's a dream come true to have the opportunity to be a part of something that is canon for the series and to create in the world that I grew up admiring. Patty Newby is a new character, so I had a little bit of creative license in the Stranger Things universe. That's just something that I could have never dreamed of or never imagined that I would have the opportunity to do.
GN: Reading the script for the first time, what stuck out to me was that there were many times in the story where Patty could have just walked away, but she didn't. She persisted. Her nobility shined through, and her resilience and her ambition kept her on the path that we see in the stage play.
Something that really drew me to Patty was that no matter what was thrown her way, she didn't shy away from the opposition. That's something I really wanted to bring to my rendition of Patty, was the justification for Henry. Why does she want to stay with Henry? Why does she care so much about him?
[What is] so beautiful about both Henry and Patty is that they're both wounded spirits. They're both damaged people. But in their relationship with each other, they find that it's okay to be themselves. Henry is the first person that's ever seen Patty and accepted her for who she is, and vice versa.
I really just wanted to make it clear why she was advocating for Henry and also showcase his humanity through Patty; because through her nobility, we get to see the boy before the monster. We get to really see what happens to him. He was a human boy. He did have these feelings that every adolescent teen has before things [went] awry. That's really important to Patty's character — we get to showcase the soft side [of Henry] before we see the awful side.
GN: Listen, if somebody tells me they're “not normal” more than once, I'm going to believe you. I like to joke that Patty is a classic version of “I CAN FIX HIM!” Girl, no, you cannot! You cannot fix him! That's a point where Patty and I definitely differ. We both see the good in people, but she really sees the best parts of people. Which is admirable, but it's also detrimental.
GN: I hope that audiences walk away feeling inspired by Patty's courage, because reading Patty's story for the first time on the page, I saw a lot of similarities between myself and her as far as our stories are concerned. Unfortunately, growing up as a biracial girl in America, you do get called certain names in school, you do get looked at a certain way, and that's something that's [accurately] reflected in the stage play.
And Kate Trefry really wanted to make sure that the representation was as accurate as possible in the Stranger Things universe. She sat us all down — the performers of color and the performers who weren't of color — [and] we had a discussion about the time period of 1959, and what that meant to us as performers and how we could incorporate that in an authentic way without taking away from the actual story of us fighting monsters and learning about Vecna.
I think Kate was incredibly sensitive and incredibly aware that we are telling a story about a little biracial girl who's in love with a white boy. And how do we show that? How do we tell that story without distracting from the main narrative, but also being respectful of the time period?
I hope that audience members of color and American audiences feel seen by Patty. I feel that it's a great responsibility to be a person of color on stage and be doing a period piece — I hope that they walk away with inspiration for her resilience, and recognition.
GN: I didn't have an opportunity to see the West End production, but I wanted to! It didn't work out timing-wise, so my first introduction was on the page, reading the script. During the audition process, they sent us the script in a locked file. It counted every time that you would open it and you had to put in a password. And the script has changed so much since then.
GN: I remember they did this thing called Week Zero where they brought in all of the principles first, before the entire company came, just to talk about the script and get to know each other. It was more of a bonding week. I walked in on the first day and I was so nervous.
I felt seasick, because Broadway was a dream that I had had since I was a little girl, and then now I'm here. It was this huge empty room, and I was like, “Okay, no one told me where to sit, so I'm just going to sit in the corner and hope that I don't rock the boat. I hope I'm not taking somebody's spot.”
I was by myself because everyone [else] was on lunch. In comes Louis from across the room. He goes, "Hey, mate!" And he's got his arms open. He gives me the biggest hug. It was like we had been old friends forever. He just sat me down, talked to me and asked me how I was really feeling because he remembered how his first day felt, and I was just telling him, "I'm so nauseous. My head is spinning. I can't really hear. My adrenaline is pumping through my veins."
And he was so kind. I remember for the first time watching him do one of the Brenner scenes, it was the sickest thing I had ever seen — because the guy that I was just having a conversation with, the sweet, fun, loving Louis, was gone.
GN: What's cool is that there are 34 people in our cast, so it's like a little village. We have our own little baby version of Hawkins, and we're at the theater 24/7 so we see a lot of each other. I had never worked with a dressing roommate before; coming from TV and film, that was just something that I've never experienced. I was very nervous about that, but my dressing roommate Alison Jaye, who plays Joyce, is phenomenal.
As a cast, we all break off into our little groups and hang out and go do different things. I know that we have an opening night after party, I don't know what that looks like yet. I know it's going to be so fun. But we do a lot of things in the theater: We hang out in the hair and makeup room a lot after shows, in each other's dressing rooms.
But we're all tired, like baseline tired. So bonding really consists of just sitting down, playing Uno, making TikToks with each other. But it's been incredible to watch that growth from week zero to opening-ish, just to look back on videos and notes that I had written to myself, thinking about first impressions and how that's morphed into the bonds that we have now.
GN: That's been the biggest learning curve for me, taking care of my body and self-care because the demands of Stranger Things: The First Shadow are astronomical. What you guys see on stage is one thing, but behind the scenes, we're running up and down flights of stairs to make our [costume] changes or to get clipped into a certain stunt.
[I've been] learning what I need to do after the show for damage control. I love to take baths. I love my magnesium salt, my Epsom salt. I love to watch Friends because it's something nice, light, and easy to watch after the show. I don't want to see anything that's stressful, anything action-related. Just light and easy. I have a voice steamer that I like to use at the end of each night to take care of my vocal cords and my throat, because there's a lot of screaming, a lot of high intensity vocal patterns. So vocal health, taking baths, watching Friends, that's my jam.
GN: Growing up on Nickelodeon, I got my start on a show called All That, which is basically Saturday Night Live for kids. There were a lot of prosthetics and a lot of wigs used in that show, but nothing to this caliber. I always begged the stunt coordinators on whatever show I was working on to, "Please, let me just do the stunt. Please let me do it." What's different about Broadway is that there are no stunt doubles. You have to do everything. So I got my wish!
It's just been so much fun, it's been a true gift to have the opportunity to actually get my hands dirty and learn how things work and overcome my fear of heights. In Act Two, there's a stunt I do that requires me to be very high in the air. That was a challenge in itself, of [understanding] like, okay, we're really high up and we're going to have to do this eight times a week. But it's been an amazing process to work with our stunt and fight coordinators to make sure that I feel safe and comfortable. I'm ready for my Marvel movie!
GN: I do, it's the bathroom scene! And there's a catwalk scene at the end of Act Two that I really enjoy doing, both of those require big stunts for me. They've been exciting for me to learn as a performer because they're challenging — I love things that are challenging. I love looking at a script and holding my breath, going, How am I going to pull this off?
GN: It's interesting, I didn't take any inspiration from pop culture per se, but I did take inspiration from my personal life. If we want to talk about the emotional umbilical cord between myself and Patty, I wanted to best encapsulate, “If I were in this situation, what would I do? If the only person that understood me was going to be taken away from me, how would I react? How would I feel?" For me, I felt more of a connection to myself [in] building my own creative aspects for Patty, especially because she's a new character in the Stranger Things universe. I really wanted to make her my own and create my own little masterpiece with her, if you will.
GN: When you're experiencing a multitude of jobs and you're working at a young age, you don't realize what it's building. Never in a million years did I think that all of the voiceover jobs, all of the television series that I had worked on, were preparing me for my Broadway debut. [Voice acting] definitely taught me how to take care of my voice [and] how to use different pieces of my voice to create a different layer of emotionality.
I think that on Nickelodeon and on television, I also learned professionalism, how to perform in front of an audience, [how] to get over my stage fright. As a whole, everything that I've done up until this point has taught me character development and enhanced my toolbox as an actor, because everything comes into play when you're on Broadway. You're singing, you're dancing, you're acting, you're using your entire physicality, your entire body. Getting my start at 13, up until now at 19, it's really been an interesting thing to reflect on.
GN: Oh, wow. This one hits me in the feels! I think I would actually ask a question. I would ask: “Did you enjoy it?” Because I have an answer now. I'm enjoying it and I'm having the most fun.
But I wonder in a year what that answer's going to be. “Did you enjoy it? What did you enjoy?” [For advice], I would say: Be where your feet are. Because I know me, I know that I'm going to be worrying about what's next. What am I doing? Where are we going? What's happening? But I think everything happens for a reason. There's a reason that God wanted me to be in New York and to be on Broadway and to have my Broadway debut with Stranger Things.
GN: I love to go back to that little girl that never dreamed she could be on Broadway, because now I'm a young adult that never dreamed she could possibly be nominated for a Tony. I would love to put that out there. Of course, I'm just here to do good work and to do my best, but that's something that I would never dream or imagine could be possible. Hopefully, fingers crossed with this Tony season!
I would love to be the next big movie star. I would love to do impactful films. I would love to continue doing performances that are meaningful and important to our society. With Henry and Patty, that is definitely something that drew me to this project, is that it is important to our culture for young people to see that relationship of acceptance. Down the road, I want to continue doing that, telling impactful stories and hopefully expanding my television and film work.
