I’ve been wondering a bit about sequels on the stage. The common wisdom is they don’t work, and the one case study that gets brought up in this discussion is Love Never Dies.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Love Never Dies is a sequel to his wildly successful The Phantom of the Opera. By most accounts it disappointed audiences and critics alike. The problems, they reported, lay neither in the score nor in the production, but in the material. I’ve heard the same said of Grease 2, the Annie sequels, and the like. Very rarely do sequels to musicals work.

What is it about the stage show that defies sequelisation? Theoretically a stage show ought to be like any other narrative work—there’s nothing in a stage show qua narrative that precludes the possibility of a decent sequel. Does it have to do with the stage show qua theatrical experience?

Maybe we want our stage shows to be standalone pieces. Maybe there’s something about the ephemerality of theatre, the fact that it exists immediately, only in the moment and nothing more, that discourages strong continuity between pieces. Maybe book and movie sequels are viable because you can read the previous books and watch the previous movies on demand, but you can’t really do the same with shows—you’d have to get a theatre company to resurrect the previous show in order to have the same effect.

The one example of a musical sequel that does seem to work on its own merits is Falsettos. William Finn wrote a one-act musical, In Trousers, in 1979, and then collaborated with James Lapine to produce sequel one-acts March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990). By convention March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland are usually presented back-to-back as one show, billed as Falsettos, while In Trousers is largely forgotten outside of musical theatre trivia. But technically, Falsettos is a musical sequel, and it works!

I wonder if this breaks through the Curse of the Stage Show Sequel. If I had to hazard an explanation for why This Is Different From The Rest, it would be that I understand Falsettos as a standalone piece. Not knowing what went on in In Trousers did not make me feel as if I was missing a key part of what made Falsettos tick. I’m not sure I can say the same for the other stage show sequel examples.

Now that we’ve brought up curses:

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a stage show, and a sequel to the Harry Potter books and movies. This is not something we’ve discussed yet—a stage show which is a sequel to something that is not a stage show—but I imagine it would bump up against the same obstacles as stage shows which are sequels to other stage shows might.

What I hear of this show is that it’s done very well. The script hasn’t had the most positive reception, but the live performance aspects of it are electric. There’s something thrilling about the Wizarding World being brought to life right before your eyes, the kind of visceral thrill that screen or a page cannot, by nature of their media, do justice to. My impression is that maybe theatregoers and Harry Potter fans weren’t clamouring for a Harry Potter stage show as a sequel, but merely a stage show set in the Potter-verse.

I’ve been wondering about sequels on the stage because Netflix has announced a Stranger Things stage show. It will be a prequel set in 1959, before the world was turned Upside Down, and its main characters will be the adults of Stranger Things when they were in high school.

As much as I enjoy Stranger Things and respect their creative team, I am a little worried. Others have worried that the stage play might contain backstory necessary to understand what happens in Stranger Things’s fifth and final season, leaving those who can’t make it to the West End in the dust. I guess my worry is more along the lines of why is it not a television or a movie spinoff? Why is a stage play the right medium for this story to be told?

Perhaps the creative team will surprise me with fulfilling answers to these questions when Stranger Things: The First Shadow debuts in London in late 2023. Until then, I maintain the same reservations that I have for stage sequels, and also more generally, franchises from other (more durable) media branching out onto the stage.