Camellia Peebles
There is a moment early in Hadestown when a starving girl asks a boy to sing her the song he has been working on, and he tells her it isn’t finished, and she tells him to sing it anyway if he wants her. He does. Something impossible happens. And I sat there thinking about how he still hasn’t fed her.
That gap is the whole show. Hadestown is a folk opera about two poor people who deal with being poor in incompatible ways, and everything that happens to them proceeds from that incompatibility. Orpheus (Reeve Carney) is a musician, the son of a muse, convinced that the song he is writing will bring spring back to a world stuck in permanent winter. He is probably right, which is the strange part. His art genuinely works. Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) has been hungry too long to care. She has no home, no food, and a storm is coming, and when she looks at the man she loves she sees someone so deep inside his own composition that he has not noticed she is starving in front of him. Hadestown asks whether beauty is worth anything when you cannot eat it, and it is honest enough not to answer easily.
Anaïs Mitchell’s musical, which began life as a concept album before becoming one of the most decorated shows on Broadway, threads the Orpheus and Eurydice myth through a Depression-era American register: New Orleans brass, folk guitar, blues, a narrator with the swagger of a vaudeville emcee. Hermes (André De Shields) opens the show by telling you exactly what kind of story you are about to watch, and it is not a spoiler to say he warns you it is a sad one. The show is upfront about being a tragedy from the first minute. What it does with that foreknowledge is where it gets interesting.
The performances carry it, and the best of them is Eurydice. It is a hell of a part, a woman whose desperation is never treated as weakness, and the vocals are genuinely stunning, the strongest in the production. She sells the hunger, which is essential, because if you do not believe her hunger the entire story collapses into a girl making a foolish choice. You believe it. The Fates are the other standout, a sardonic trio who follow her around voicing every doubt she has ever had, and they are sassy as hell and unnervingly good at it. Persephone (Amber Gray) gets to be the loosest, most alive presence in the underworld, and Hades (Patrick Page) is a rumbling, imposing bass with a marital problem he has tried to solve by building an empire, which is a very specific and very funny kind of god to write.
Orpheus, for what it’s worth, is pitched at a register of total unrelenting earnestness, a slippery folk falsetto that slides between singing and talk-singing, and it is a stylistic choice that will land beautifully for some viewers and prove distracting for others. It did not stop the show from working, but it is worth knowing going in.
What is not up for debate is the ensemble. The chorus of Hadestown is exceptional, and the physical staging is the most impressive thing in the production. This is a company that builds an entire world out of bodies, hand props, and lighting, with a precision that never once feels like people waiting for their cue. There is a sequence involving swinging overhead lamps during a descent that is one of the best things I have seen staged in years, and the workers’ numbers in the underworld are all sinew and rhythm, a factory rendered in choreography. If you are the kind of viewer who notices set awareness and prop work, the discipline on display here is a joy.
Because underneath the myth, Hadestown is a labor story, and it is not subtle about it. The underworld is not a place of fire and torment; it is a company town. There is a wall, and there is work, and there is a boss who has convinced everyone that the wall is what keeps them safe, and there are people who came down here because the surface was cold and the surface was hungry and someone offered them security. The show’s most chilling number is a rhythmic anthem about why we build the wall, and it does not require any translation into modern politics because it never left them. Poverty is what recruits for Hadestown. That is the argument, and it is delivered in brass.
Whether it lands for you may depend on your tolerance for sincerity, because Hadestown has no irony in it anywhere. It believes completely in the things it is saying about love and art and hope, and it says them at full volume without a wink. For viewers who meet it there, it is devastating. For viewers wired toward the arch and the sardonic, that unbroken earnestness can feel like being handed something you were not prepared to hold. I spent a chunk of the run time somewhere between those two responses, and I suspect that is a common experience.
But the show earns its ending, and I will not describe it beyond saying that the framing device is not decoration. Hermes tells you at the top that this is a sad song and that we are going to sing it anyway, and by the time you reach the last number you understand that the anyway is the entire point. Hadestown is about the value of making something beautiful in a world that will not be fixed by it. That is either the most naive proposition in modern musical theater or the only useful one, and on the right night, in the right seat, it is very hard to tell the difference.
