Hadestown
Opening Night: April 17, 2019
Theater: Walter Kerr Theater
Website: www.hadestown.com
Welcome to HADESTOWN, where a song can change your fate. This acclaimed new musical by celebrated singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell and innovative director Rachel Chavkin (Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812) is a love story for today… and always. HADESTOWN intertwines two mythic tales — that of young dreamers Orpheus and Eurydice, and that of King Hades and his wife Persephone — as it invites you on a hell-raising journey to the underworld and back. Mitchell’s beguiling melodies and Chavkin’s poetic imagination pit industry against nature, doubt against faith, and fear against love. Performed by a vibrant ensemble of actors, dancers and singers, HADESTOWN is a haunting and hopeful theatrical experience that grabs you and never lets go.
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April 17, 2019
All your favorite Greeks are heading somewhere in “Hadestown,” the sumptuous, hypnotic and somewhat hyperactive musical that opened on Wednesday night after its own twisty 13-year road to Broadway. Eurydice descends to the underworld; Orpheus follows to retrieve her. Persephone spends six months aboveground living the good life of summer and song before returning for six months below with Hades. (He’s her husband.) Hermes, of course, has wings on his feet. And the Fates (at least in this version) are always darting about, minding everyone’s business. But watching “Hadestown” unfold so gorgeously at the Walter Kerr Theater, I found myself thinking of other Greek characters: those lucky few saved from heartbreak by radical metamorphoses.
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April 17, 2019
Here’s my advice: Go to hell. And by hell, of course, I mean Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s fizzy, moody, thrilling new Broadway musical. Ostensibly, at least, the show is a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy goes to the land of the dead in hopes of retrieving girl, boy loses girl again. “It’s an old song,” sings our narrator, the messenger god Hermes (André De Shields, a master of arch razzle-dazzle). “And we’re gonna sing it again.” But it’s the newness of Mitchell’s musical account—and Rachel Chavkin’s gracefully dynamic staging—that bring this old story to quivering life.
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April 17, 2019
In “Road to Hell,” the exhilarating opening number of the utterly fabulous Hadestown, Hermes, the conductor of souls into the afterlife, invites us to “Ride that train to the end of the line.” He’s played with seductive authority and knowing humor by the eternally elegant Andre De Shields, outfitted like a superfly pimp in a flashy silver suit, and it’s hard to imagine anyone resisting his call. He sells a ticket to a bewitching journey that pays off at every turn. Spun out of a 2010 concept album by singer-songwriter Anais Mitchell and developed together with director Rachel Chavkin as a seamless theatrical experience, this beguiling, virtually sung-through musical is notable for the expressive beauty of its score, the dark imagination of its stage pictures and the clarity of its storytelling. Performed by a first-rate cast and played with spirited feeling by seven onstage musicians, it arrives on Broadway with a furnace-like blast of creativity.
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April 17, 2019
“Hadestown” triggered a lot of buzz when this wholly American show (which came to the stage by way of a concept album) premiered at Off Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop in 2016. Arriving on Broadway with its earthly delights more or less intact, this perfectly heavenly musical — with book, music and lyrics by Anaïs Mitchell — should stick around for a while. Although the production has lost some of the electricity that goes with playing in the round, director Rachel Chavkin (“Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812”), who also helped with the show’s development, has done a super job of adapting this pretty thing for a proscenium stage. What it loses scenically — namely, a visual sense of the arduous nature of the hero’s journeys to and from the underworld — it makes up for in other ways.
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April 17, 2019
Broadway is doing some remarkable myth-making this season, or maybe myth-revising. Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! is upending that great American folktale of the frontier. Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird is taking on the myth of its very own origins. And now Hadestown, the most thrilling new original musical of the season, is taking on the great grandfolk of all mythology, sending Orpheus and Eurydice straight to Hades via the irresistible rhythms of New Orleans jazz, sultry French Quarter gyrations and a cast no pantheon could have improved. Written by the immensely talented singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell – the musical began life as folk opera concept album, then was developed at New York Theatre Workshop – Hadestown is brought to remarkable life by director Rachel Chavkin, who does for the Quarter and hell what she did for Tolstoy’s Russia with 2016’s equally fine Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.
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