Hadestown Musical Review

Telling a love story in the middle of the apocalypse would be like writing a musical now!

Anyway, let me tell you about my favorite musical. Hadestown is a story about stories. It is a Greek tragedy for our times. A musical about the apocalypse written 15 years ago, and it has become more popular in the past few years as we have watched the world end around us. It is a story that asks - is there any point in making art, even now? 

In researching this speech, I read several interviews with the creators of Hadestown, and listened to the soundtrack...again. Today I’ll tell you about the show’s creation, its reception, and its meaning.

Anaïs Mitchell wrote Hadestown in 2006. Initially, she acted in it as well, playing the part of Eurydice. Later, she met the director, Rachel Chavkin, in 2012, after seeing her show, The Great Comet, and getting in contact with her in the hopes of collaborating. Hadestown was not to be a typical musical, she explained, according to an interview with the Guardian - it was not prose, but poetry.

In recent years, Mitchell claims in an interview by Variety, audiences have started reacting differently to certain aspects of the show. The show was always political, though Mitchell says it is not a protest - “It’s a love story, but politics really is romantic,” she said in an interview with Vogue. Regardless, by 2016, even the less perceptive folks in the audience took notice when Hades sang a song - written a decade prior - called “Why Do We Build The Wall?” Sudden relevance may have helped the show's popularity - it made its Broadway debut in 2019, and has won 8 Tonys. 

In the tradition of Anais Mitchell's favorite musicals, such as Les Miserables and Sweeney Todd, Hadestown is a sung-through musical. It retells the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as of Persephone and Hades. The narrator is the messenger god Hermes, who was, in myth, typically portrayed as a child. However, here he is an old man, under some sort of Sisyphean curse to tell the same tragic story over and over again, powerless to change it. And he still thinks every time that "maybe it'll turn out different this time". It is hope that tortures him, and hope that keeps him alive.

The story takes place in a vague setting that looks a lot like the Great Depression, in a world which is undergoing climate change because the goddess of springtime, Persephone, is stuck in the underworld with her increasingly controlling husband Hades, god of death and riches. Hades rules the underworld like a Depression-era factory, collecting workers made desperately poor by this apocalypse. Work is Hell.

Our Orpheus is a naïve starving artist, who "could make you see how the world could be, in spite of the way that it is." The wood nymph Eurydice is, here, "a runaway from everywhere she's ever been," contrasting his naïveté with a world-weary bitterness beyond her years. The first words he says to her - immediately after being warned by Hermes not to come on too strong - are "come home with me." Their romance begins with a song of sweet nothings, as Orpheus promises that when he sings his song, “spring will come again”, and that "the trees are gonna lay the wedding table". Tragically, Eurydice is lured to the underworld by Hades, who promises her, if nothing else, that she will never be cold or hungry again. "I want to lie down forever," she sings. When Orpheus descends to the underworld and sings his song, he reminds Hades that he loves his wife. He also comes close to inciting a riot, which is why this Hades makes Orpheus the same deal he always does. "Give him a rope, and he'll hang himself," sing the Fates, dedicated to ensuring the story goes how it's supposed to. This is a retelling of an ancient myth that has been retold many times over, and we know how it ends - yet, somehow, Hadestown is about hope. 

The story ends the way it always does. Orpheus turns. Eurydice falls. Nonetheless, this time, his song brings the springtime back. This time, the song was worth singing - and the story worth telling again after all. "It's a tragedy, but we sing it anyway."