Looking for a new, socially conscious musical to make you feel all the emotions you’ve ignored ever since you finished listening to the soundtrack of Hamilton? Hadestown is it.
Beautifully sung, powerfully written, and startlingly relevant, Hadestown reimagines the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, intertwined with the story of Hades and Persephone. It has the swingy, jazzy vibe of Great Depression era New Orleans! It won eight Tony Awards! Its themes are ones that affect us today! It’s a sad tale! It’s a tragedy! What more could you want?
If my short summary hasn’t convinced you to listen to the entire soundtrack immediately, then just take a look at the trailer embedded below. Welcome to Hadestown, where a song can change your fate!
Hadestown opened on Broadway in 2019, and promptly won Best Musical at the Tony’s. Anaïs Mitchell originally wrote the music in 2006, describing it as "a D.I.Y. theatre project." The full cast recording has recently been released. Even if you can’t afford to see a musical in New York City, you can get emotional in the privacy of your own home!
If you are not the biggest fan of musicals, this may not be the best place to start, as it is almost entirely sung. Like 2015’s Hamilton, it is essentially two hours of singing. It’s one of the most vocally interesting musicals I have heard in a long time, and it’s arranged so beautifully that you’ll find yourself moved near to tears by the swell of the orchestra. Have I sold you yet?
Spoilers ahead, obviously. This story is inspired by an ancient Greek myth, so I think you’d have to be blissfully unaware of some pretty ubiquitous archetypes to be under the impression that this might end well.
Most of us know the story. Hades is the god who rules over the Underworld. Persephone, his wife, returns to the surface world for half the year, bringing spring for six months and leaving winter behind when she descends. Singing Orpheus and Eurydice fall in love. Orpheus is allowed to rescue her from the Land of the Dead, on a condition from Hades. Eurydice must walk behind Orpheus… If his trust falters and he looks back, Eurydice will be sentenced to remain in the Underworld forever.
I’ll take a moment to gush over the musical before I get into the meat of it:
Lyrically and musically, this whole experience is incredibly powerful. That’s what a decade of Anaïs Mitchell’s tinkering will do. It makes a musical that is pretty damn effective in saying what it wants to. No words are wasted. Every song has a point, setting the stage for the development. There are a lot of parallels between numbers that particularly stark: I’ll encourage you to listen to “Wait for Me” and it’s reprise back to back.
It has that swelling jazz and powerful ensemble that sounds both as old as time and incredibly new, making it a “sound for sore ears” in a time when so many new Broadway musicals are adaptations of our favorite movies with that canned and poppy sound. So many musicals have been composed in the hopes of using a popular title to draw in the unlikely theater-goers, and so many of them sound repetitive and familiar. They played with what worked, but now it’s played out.
Not only did Mitchell create such a unique sound to it, but she also cast a series of unique voices. Patrick Page, who has played Hades from Off-Broadway in 2016 to Broadway in 2019, sings with a powerful, booming bass-baritone that makes his portrayal truly commanding. It’s awe-inspiring. Listening to his voice in “Hey, Little Songbird” makes me feels as if he is singing from the depths of the earth. His musical wife, Persephone, is played by Amber Gray on Broadway, and I particularly love her vocal dexterity. I expected Persephone to have the trilling voice of a nightingale, given that she essentially embodies spring, but Gray has a soulful, almost rough voice. She’s a powerhouse. I’m obsessed.
Eurydice and Orpheus are very well matched, played by Eva Noblezada and Reeve Carney, respectively. She is so slight and he is so tall and they are so precious. They have a very organic kind of chemistry that makes it easy to believe that they are doomed lovers. They seem so desperate to love each other. It’s delicious.
André de Shields leads the story as Hermes, and he is incredibly effective. He deftly guides the story. His voice is the first and the last that we hear. The final song is a reprise of the opening number, with a powerful change. While the opening is brassy and swingy, the closing is almost breathtakingly silent. Much of it is just de Shields, singing with almost no music. It begins with a few tinkling notes of a piano, but for much of his singing monologue, it is entirely acapella. Chills. He's regal, otherworldly.
The tale is particularly powerful due to the united front of the ensemble and the haunting combination of the Fates. At times they sing in a chant, at times it has a plodding, monotonous sound that replicates the daily drudgery of their work in the underworld. The harmony of the Fates weaving in and out of the action makes everything feel so connected. That paired with the repeating music themes and the powerful swelling orchestra heightens the drama to an epic level.
There are a few differences from the classical myth, however. The tale is narrated by Hermes, the messenger god, an interesting take in and of itself as it essentially imagines the story as a fable, a tale delivered to us by the messenger. Souls are ferried to the Underworld by train. There is an ever present murmur as the three Fates sing (always singing in the back of your mind), as if Hermes gives us the text and the Fates clarify the subtextual implications.
Eurydice is a poor girl who yearns for a stable life. Our Orpheus is in the process of writing a song to beckon spring back to the land. The Underworld is imagined as an endless Industrial factory, manned by departed souls. Hades brings Persephone back early out of loneliness. She is not happy about it.
Hades rails to keep the Underworld from pure by building a wall. (“Why do we build the wall? We build the wall to keep us free… The wall keeps out the enemy… The enemy is poverty… because they want what we have got… We have work, and they have none… and the war is never won.”)
He invites Eurydice to join him in Hadestown, in part because he resents that Persephone does not seem to fully appreciate his world. (“You don’t even want my love. I’ll give it to someone who does.”) Her meets Eurydice and invites her to join him instead. (“The choice is yours if you’re willing to choose, seeing as you’ve got nothing to lose and I could use a canary.”)
Eurydice chooses to descend in hopes that she can ensure her survival, especially as Hades reminds her that her love is a penniless poet. She fears the prospect of living in poverty for the rest of her life, and this shakes her so much that she makes the choice to give up her life.
She realizes the consequences of what she has done all too soon. Choosing the Underworld makes her “dead to the world;” she will soon forget her life above. Her mind begins to fade, losing the memory of her love, her passion, even her name as she ignored by a seemingly indifferent crowd of the dead. Realizing what he has lost, Orpheus pledges to journey to hell on foot and bring Eurydice back. But her contract prohibits her from every leaving without Hades’ permission.
Hades turns Orpheus away, as he doesn’t has his “papers” and is thus trespassing. Orpheus’ lament causes a listening Persephone to pity his lot. Though they argue, Hades realizes that the citizens of the Underworld are so moved by Orpheus’ despair that they begin to oppose Hades’ dictatorial rule. (“Show them the crack and they’ll tear down the wall. Lend them an ear and the kingdom will fall. The kingdom will fall for a song.”)
He must choose between allowing the lovers to leave and thus lose his authoritarian control, or separating the two, which would martyr them in the eyes of the workers. (“All my children came here poor, clamoring for bed and board. Now what do they clamor for? Freedom! Freedom!”) In order to avoid a lose-lose situation, he issues an ultimatum that he knows will cause the couple to doom themselves.
Plagued by doubt and the fear of trickery, Orpheus looks back. Who wouldn’t?
Even though I already knew how the story was going to end, the final act still moved me to tears. The story is propelled by hope, and we as the audience hope too that perhaps this story will turn out differently.
It won’t. Hermes, the wing-footed god who serves as the stories narrator, makes us aware of that in the opening number. “It’s an old song,” he remarks, “It’s an old tale from way back when. It’s an old song, but we’re gonna sing it again.” He emphasizes that though the ending is tragic, it is the telling of the story that matters. “We sing it anyway,” he concludes.
That’s the thing about stories. It’s not always so much about the characters, but about what the characters represent about the human condition. What did you learn in AP English? What does it mean? And why do we continue to tell it? What is the point of retelling a centuries old myth in a musical?
Parts of this story has changed over the years but we care about what is left when the story is boiled down to its essence. Hope. Doubt. Trust. We may have magic tablets in our hands, and we may have stopped shitting into a hole in the ground, but these remain.
Hermes says that “we’re gonna sing it again and again,” and isn’t that exactly what we are doing? We all (hopefully) knew how this was going to end. This type of myth exists in other cultures, too. Off the top of my head I think of the tale of Lot and his wife. I know it from the Christian tradition, but it is represented in Judaism and Islam. God condemns the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. God allows Lot and his family to flee, on the condition that they must not look back, but rather trust in him. Lot’s wife turns around and is immediately turned into a pillar of salt for her disbelief. There is a lot more building up to that story, but that’s the gist.
Faith is the basis of all religions (I say, at the risk of sounding reductive). In order to follow a diety, or to believe in something that you cannot see, you must have faith. Of course, having faith is tricky. We know that. That’s why we are not too surprised when Orpheus turns around. I know that I would have to try pretty damn hard to resist that temptation. Journeying out of hell, just trusting that my love is behind me, knowing that if she isn’t, she will be trapped forever, and I can never come back? I’d want to take a glance, at least to make sure I hadn’t journeyed in vain.
I am well aware of these universal themes, but part of what I enjoyed is how some elements seemed particularly relevant. I know I felt a chill when the chorus chanted about why they build a wall. Even without the connotation, without assumptions, Patrick Page, the Broadway Hades, has a terrifyingly low, almost gravely growl that will send a shiver down your spine.
Interestingly enough, Anaïs Mitchell did not write this song with the wall-loving President Trump in mind, but it certainly is eerie that your mind jumps there (It was even myth busted on Snopes). She wrote this song in 2006, a decade before Trump was elected and long before he made his wall issue a cornerstone of his campaign. The Associated Press reported that she had written it in a more general sense, thinking of the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall of China, the fenced in gated communities. It’s certainly nothing new. Ideas of xenophobia, purity at all costs, separating a culture from others are ever present, both today and in history. Wars are fought, genocides are rationalized, borders are drawn over these ideas.
What makes this song particularly disquieting is the call and response structure. Hades asks why they build the wall, and the answer is repeated back in unison, over and over. It builds upon itself, justifying itself throughout the course. The wall keeps them free, keeping out the enemy of poverty. They define the enemy and why they must resist. Poverty is wanting what those inside have got, and they do not want to give away what they have. The war is never won. By the end, Eurydice is chanting along. It’s a common pattern. The prejudice makes sense to them. And by having a powerful, underworld boss dictate the attitudes, we can see how easily they are indoctrinated. It’s how other walls were justified, and it’s perhaps how it is happening now. Mitchell wasn’t thinking about elections and slogans. You’re the one who jumped there, not her. The coincidence is purely archetypal.
What I find even more compelling about this musical is that it so adroitly captured the struggles of class conflict without feeling heavy handed. Eurydice is poor. It’s her main identifier in all of Hermes’ songs. Do you think she would have been so easily manipulated if she hadn’t been starving and worried about the chances for her survival? Do you think Hades would have had such a powerful bargaining chip if Eurydice had the money for food and shelter? I don’t think so. She can’t afford to take any chance at her survival, literally.
Class struggle is central to this narrative. Hades represents the heartless tycoon. Eurydice represents the working poor who he exploits. Can I make it any clearer? I think the Fates put it pretty clearly in the song “Gone, I’m Gone”:
You can have your principles when you've got a belly full
But hunger has a way with you
There's no telling what you're gonna do when the chips are down
Now that the chips are down
What you gonna do when the chips are down?
Now that the chips are down.
I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d like to think that when the moment comes, they’d choose to stay with the ones they love rather than save their own skin. I personally think that these people are very pompous and have never understood what it is like to be at the mercy of money. These are people who have never had to choose between paying their electric bill and eating for the week, the people who have never spent the winter driving with a broken window because they can’t afford to fix it. If I’m Eurydice here, I’m 100% choosing to save my ass.
Eurydice is a worldly character. It is emphasized that she is “no stranger to the world” and our narrator makes it pretty clear that she has been at its mercy. She has scrounged for food and been at buffeted any way the wind blows. Her lines make it pretty clear that she doesn’t want to live like this anymore. When she falls in love with Orpheus, she worries that she won’t be able to find stability. When you don’t know where your next meal might come for, you’d do pretty much anything to be sure. I’d argue that falling in love with Orpheus made her even more worried about security, considering she didn’t want to risk that both she and the man she loved would be living in poverty. I’d even go so far to suggest that she is hoping that by giving herself up, she will not only secure her safety, but also make sure that Orpheus only has to worry about taking care of himself, not having to think about how their family will make it through. She can’t guarantee that his song will work. All she can truly count upon is herself.
In their conversation during “Hey, Little Songbird,” Hades makes sure to call out that Orpheus is a penniless poet. At this point, Eurydice is just tired. It grates on you. When you don’t have food and shelter, it’s hard to worry about much else. Just think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. She has nothing to lose and she doesn’t have much choice. She’s desperate. Once again, the Fates sum it up best, singing “Life ain’t easy, life ain’t fair, a girl’s gotta fight for her rightful share… Help yourself, to hell with the rest. Even the one who loves you best.”
The main problem is that Hades doesn’t tell her exactly what she’s in for. She’s never been down to the Underworld and it’s not like anyone has come back to tell the story. Hades doesn’t bother to let her in on the secret. He reminds me of a genie in this way, the ones who are so literal about everything, the one who hears “make me a sandwich” and turns you into a BLT. Had he told her that she would lose her sense of self and forget everyone that ever mattered to her, I doubt she would have been so willing to go.
Hades is in a position of power. He had a renewable power source, given that people are going to keep dying and thus have to work in his factory. He can exploit the dead without consequences, as he is the undisputed overlord of this realm. It’s a pretty clear parallel to how in the real world, the wealthy are so often the ones who make the rules. They are the ones who have the money to finance elections and campaigns. The ones who control the megacorporations that are essential to our lives. The ones who often get away with literal murder because they can afford an incredible lawyer.
The Fates comment in “Nothing Changes” that fighting the power will often do nothing. It’s like swimming upstream. You’ll probably be carried back anyway, so why bother to struggle? I think Orpheus puts it pretty clearly in the song “If It’s True”:
“But the ones who tell the lies
Are the solemnest to swear
And the ones who load the dice
Always say the toss is fair.”
The change in this story comes when the factory workers hear Orpheus’ song and take pity upon him. Had Orpheus stayed silence, he probably would have journeyed out without incident. Persephone persuades Hades to listen to his plea, but his fear of a workers’ strike probably tipped the scales. In order to have continued control over those suffering, his authority must not be questioned. The workers feel united against Hades out of their pity for Orpheus. And if they are united, there isn’t much to stop his empire from toppling.
Of course, either way, his authority is already undermined. If he doesn’t let Orpheus and Eurydice go, he is facing a revolt. And if he does, there isn’t much to stop his army of dead from turning against him. The kingdom will fall for a song. He chooses to let them hang themselves.
I think this is part of why this musical is so heartbreaking—the ending feels inevitable. We are told from the beginning that this is a tragedy, but we already know that the deck was stacked against them. We are all very familiar with class politics. We know that the rich are able to take advantage of the poor. But every time, we hope that they won’t and we feel helpless watching it end just like we thought it would.
In his ending song, Hermes sings that we can’t ask how he came so close, as “the song was written long ago.” These confines have been in place for a long time. The structure was in place, the framework was designed this way, we all know the deal. But it still hurts to watch it happen.
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