First, a confession: Unlike many critics, I didn’t go bonkers for Rachel Chavkin’s staging of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812—or the musical itself, for that matter. The production’s heavy-handed slamming of the fourth wall on and off-Broadway, with actors melodramatically darting among audience members (at Ars Nova and then Kazino) or facing them with the aid of onstage seating and runways reaching into the mezzanine (later, at the Imperial Theatre) did little to make Dave Malloy’s elusive melodies more compelling as songs blurred into recitative, or to endear me to characters who, for all the show’s hip cachet—not to mention its canonical source (Tolstoy’s War and Peace)—could seem surprisingly simplistic.
I mention this not as a gratuitous gripe, but because Chavkin’s latest Broadway outing, Hadestown, is another work that’s mostly sung through, qualifying as more of a pop or folk opera (as it’s been described), or operetta, than a conventional musical. Once again, it arrives on Broadway after an acclaimed run downtown—and in this case, a whole string of incarnations prior to that. Composer/lyricist/librettist Anaïs Mitchell is a singer/songwriter whose critically praised albums include an earlier version of Hadestown, which started life as a community theater project more than a decade ago. It’s since been developed with Chavkin, with its most recent stagings in Edmonton, Canada and at London’s National Theatre.
The Hadestown that just premiered at the Walter Kerr Theatre began ominously, for me, with the marvelous André De Shields, playing Hermes, the messenger god, introducing characters culled from Greek mythology and drama, including the Fates and a chorus. The performers took turns stepping forward as the onstage band—whose members would be introduced individually during the show— accompanied them on the blues-inflected opening number, “Road to Hell.” This is not your grandparents’ musical, I imagined them all telling the audience. We’re going to be dark and cool, and not insult your intelligence by making you suspend disbelief.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★★☆ review here.]
But this time, I’m happy to say, my skepticism proved less warranted. For starters, Mitchell is a gifted tunesmith, and lyricist, who approaches musical theater with a clear, infectious sense of wonder. Her melodic savvy, if not entirely consistent over a run time of nearly two and a half hours with little spoken dialogue, is buttressed by an ear for piercing, haunting harmonies, abetted here by musical director and vocal arranger Liam Robinson.
Moreover, Mitchell and, to her credit, Chavkin have mined a beautiful and theatrically resonant tale from their source material. If there are traces of the pretensions that marred Natasha in this heavily stylized production, the director and her lavishly talented design team remain in service to the story, which ties together the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice, respectively played by Reeve Carney and Eva Noblezada, and Hades and Persephone, played by Patrick Page and Amber Gray.
Page, the elder statesman in this group, lays the dark foundation as king of the underworld, his basso voice dropping to gravelly depths as he surveys his captors and eyes potential recruits. In a moment that’s both chilling and a welcome flash of comic relief, his Hades tilts down a pair of sunglasses to check out Noblezada’s Eurydice, a ripe ragamuffin whose sweetly piquant vocals bring to mind Mitchell’s, but with less of a rootsy edge and more theater polish.
Carney’s Orpheus is very much Page’s foil, singing in a keening tenor that reaches to a startlingly clear, pure falsetto when he is wooing Eurydice or, later, trying to persuade Hades to release her. In Mitchell’s version, Eurydice descends to the underworld not as the result of a poisonous snake bite, but of her own accord, after Hades appeals to her hunger and anguish as she wanders in a storm, while an oblivious Orpheus works on his music.
Gray’s Persephone, meanwhile, prances and stumbles about in an alcoholic haze, her sexy but unsettling presence and exotic beauty suggesting a mythological Billie Holiday. She, DeShields and the trio of wonderful singers cast as the Fates (Jewelle Blackman, Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer and Kay Trinidad) ensure that Hadestown provides soulful entertainment, even when the show threatens to get mired in a Big Statement—the bombastic production number “Why We Build the Wall,” for instance, bound to inspire comparisons between Hades and another autocratic leader closer to home.
David Neumann’s muscular but lyrical choreography and Rachel Hauck’s set design, which captures the dusky decadence and spiritual squalor of Hades’s realm, also deserve praise, as do Michael Krass’s costumes, which combine Brechtian austerity (the shades of grey worn by Hermes and the Fates, for example) with purposefully gaudy and exuberant flourishes, such as the fabulous green number Persephone models upon her entrance, and to welcome spring. If there is more darkness than light in Hadestown, there’s also a tender love story—two, in fact, one ending on a more hopeful note than you might expect—and songs and performances that will lift mortal spirits, from wherever they lurk.
Hadestown opened April 17, 2019, at the Walter Kerr Theatre and runs through September 1. Tickets and information: hadestown.com
