Carly Pettit, as Barb, and Lucas Paterson, as Demigorgon, in Stranger Sings! the Parody Musical. Photo by Emily Rutledge.

To appreciate a parody, I should be familiar with the source material, I thought. So as soon as I’d booked a ticket to watch the DarkStage production of Jonathan Hogue’s Stranger Sings!: The Parody Musical this weekend, I re-upped my Netflix subscription and watched the whole first season of Stranger Things and part of the second. (then the allure of getting caught up with The Resident and Heartstopper distracted me…)

I’m glad I watched it, continuously, so I was familiar with not only all the main characters but their plot arcs in the musical. However, I did not expect that a much longer list of movie and musical source material would also help! After a while, I started trying to make a list in my head of all the references I recognized, and some that I was pretty sure were callbacks to other material but I wasn’t sure what. A version of Rainbow Connection from The Muppet Movie. A tribute to E.T. and his human friend cycle-flying across the sky in E.T. Heathers. Little Women. Gypsy. Breakfast Club. Beetlejuice. Winona Rider’s filmography in detail.

The Netflix series (2016-present) starts out as a nostalgic look at 1980s culture in a small homogeneous town starting a group of small boys on a D&D quest. Like a slightly-updated Stand By Me. But then, as in the comic-books / Amazon Prime series Papergirls, things turn science-fictional and X-Files-y. To enjoy the TV story, I kept having to ignore distracting thoughts about the handwavey pseudoscience and loose ends in the plot.

One of the things I loved about Stranger Sings!, then, was the way that the script and actions call out many of those unlikely bits in the source material. Using a folded-paper analogy to explain multiverse theory and figure out how to access a portal to the Upside Down. But Stranger Sings! points out how ridiculous this is. And the happy ending of Will’s rescue in the TV series, completely ignoring that another kid, Barb Holland, is still missing and unexplained. The musical version leans into this – Barb (Carly Pettitt), the popular girl’s less stylish sidekick, calls them all out for ignoring her while she becomes powerful in the alternate-universe and the love interest of the resident Demigorgon there. Pettitt’s voice is up to the challenge, and her characterization and physicality are spot-on.

Director David Son is a choreographer with a strong dance background, and that showed in the variety of well-done ensemble movement numbers. There was even a bit of tap! (Jack Hunting, recently seen in Walterdale’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, and here playing the inarticulate and telekinetic child Eleven).

The cast of ten portrayed at least twice that many characters, with costumes by Debo Gunning. The four little boys in the D&D group are Will, the one who goes missing early on, played as a puppet by Melenie Reid (who also plays his mother Joyce), and Renell Doneza, Jeremey Zimmerman, and Jason Wong. I was impressed by all of them. Jeremey, convincing as a nerdy awkward 12-year-old, had been an effective Tom Collins in ELOPE’s Rent last year.

Other compelling main vocal roles are played by Liz Janzen (Nancy), Melenie Reid (Will’s mother Joyce), and Brian Christensen (Nancy’s two teenage love interests, bad-boy Steve and nerdy photographer Jonathan). Connor Foy (whom I last saw in Walterdale’s Austentatious) was consistently funny as Hopper, the sheriff with a tragic past he won’t let us forget, and Lucas Paterson was an expressively flamboyant Demigorgon.

The show is performed in the intimate black-box space of the Backstage Theatre at the Arts Barns. There is a four-piece live band in the wing, under the direction of Grace Huang, and the sound mixing was good enough that I didn’t miss any of the exceedingly clever lyrics.

The music, the lyrics, and the approach to a familiar story reminded me a lot of the Grindstone Theatre / Simon Abbott&Byron Martin body of work. I’ll watch for future work from this new company.

The run of Stranger Sings! continues to October 26th, and some shows are selling out. Tickets are available here.