Hadestown is a folk musical, now Broadway-bound after a long production history. Anais Mitchell (daughter of Quaker sheep farmers Don and Cheryl Mitchell of Middlebury) started with a concept album, which then became an off-Broadway show directed by Rachel Chavkin of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. It’s now on the huge Olivier stage at the National Theatre. And it’s good.
André de Shields plays Hermes, the charismatic narrator who recalls Morgan Freeman in The Gospel at Colonus as he guides us through the elements of a universal story. With a few twists.
In this version, the underworld is not simply where we go when we die. It’s a kind of corporate dystopia, where Hades rules over workers who have signed over their freedom for a slave-like existence that provides the necessities of life in exchange for their labor. (Boots Riley’s new movie Sorry to Bother You plays with this same idea.)
Eurydice, then, goes to the underworld not because of a snakebite, but because she needs to eat. Her boyfriend is, after all, a struggling musician. Once in the underworld, she joins the (excellent!) dancing chorus, which expertly evokes the lives of oppressed miners in Hadestown.
There’s one glaring weakness in the show: Reeve Carney’s Orpheus. Orpheus is supposed to be the singer so gifted he could move rocks and trees, but he’s not even the best singer in this show. The real strength of both the production and the writing lies in the narrator, Hermes, and in the ruling couple of the Underworld, Hades and Persephone.
Persephone, in fact, turns out to be key. Portrayed as a flashy party girl by Amber Gray, she dons a brilliant green gown to live it up in New Orleans during her time above ground before putting her black garb back on for her six months in the underworld.
Mitchell has not given us a happy ending to the story—Orpheus still loses Eurydice—but a twist at the end, cleverly echoed in the Olivier’s impressive revolve system, suggests that death is not final, that our lives may be more like Persephone’s than we realize.
This past Thursday Sarah Hemming, chief theater critic of The Financial Times (“the salmon pink paper”), reviewed the current iteration and cast of the London production, and loved it. She noted the current Orpheus, Donal Finn, and his “stunningly ethereal falsetto” and, too, a hint of optimism, “the hope that in some future retelling we might change the narrative.”
My own engagement with this myth, as an artistic matter, is limited. But starts with “Black Orpheus” which won the AA for best foreign picture in 1960. I saw it at college. It’s set in Rio during Carnival, and is a riot of glorious color and a music score infused with bossa nova and samba. Death, a reveler dressed as a skeleton, stalks Eurydice. And after the tragedy is complete, a hint of optimism as young children sing and dance while the sun rises
Later I discovered an aria from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice, “Che faro senza Euridice.” I came upon it when I began listening to recordings made by an English contralto named Kathleen Ferrier who, mid-century, became enormously popular in Britain and Europe. She made the role of Orpheus her own, and it was her final role before dying at age 41 in 1953.
A generation or so later came another Brit, Janet Baker, a mezzo-soprano, who also sang Orpheus and, unlike Ferrier, we have video of her, including her final performance before retiring from the operatic stage. This, her final “Che faro senza Euridice” is deeply moving and can be found at YouTube.
Here’s the address (not a link):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=571EsWxmNGo