Hadestown Libretto and Play
Title: Hadestown
Author: Anaïs Mitchell
Publisher: Concord Theatricals
Publication Year: 2019
ISBN: 9780573708855
Rating: 5 stars
I had hoped to see Hadestown on Broadway the past couple of times I visited NYC, but I always have a lot I want to see and do (and eat) and never enough time to do it all in, so it just hasn’t worked out. On my trip last August, the closest I was able to get was buying the Hadestown libretto from The Drama Book Shop. I was very excited when the Clay Center announced their 2024-2045 Broadway in Charleston lineup because the touring company of Hadestown would finally be within reach. I also knew that because I already had the libretto, this would make a great blog post.
Hadestown is considered a “folk opera,” which means that it is an opera—a theatrical production in which everything is sung— with classic folk characters, themes, and musical stylings. The fact that it is an opera means that almost all of the dialogue is sung (some is spoken rhythmically to music, but it is still part of the musical number). There aren’t scenes of just dialogue or dialogue between songs like you would see in a musical. If you listen to the Original Broadway Cast Recording from start to finish, you’ve heard the entire show. The play tells the well-known tale of Orpheus and Eurydice (if the story isn’t well known to you, you can check out this older post about Sarah Ruhl’s play interpreting the story), but interwoven with the tale of these two doomed lovers is the story of Hades and Persephone and their love.
In the libretto, the setting is described as taking inspiration from the “American Depression Era and the city of New Orleans.” The New Orleans vibe definitely comes through in the music and sets, but the Depression vibe wasn’t as well developed in my opinion—there is definitely economic instability and poverty depicted that contributes majorly to the feeling but other than the costumes of the Fates, I didn’t feel like the 30s fashion was really represented in the costuming.
In the play, the god Hermes, a family friend of Orpheus serves as a narrator for the story. Orpheus is “a poor boy working on a song” that is going to heal the world (6). Eurydice is “a young girl looking for something to eat” who has moved around and taken care of herself her entire life (7). She yearns for stability. The world is in disarray and needs to be saved by Orpheus’s song because of the issues in Hades’s and Persephone’s marriage. Hades has become essentially an industrial robber baron forcing the souls in Hadestown into backbreaking labor in mines, refineries, and factories in order to provide material wealth. Because Persephone is supposed to spend half the year away from him, he wants to give her things that will make her want to stay with him in Hadestown all the time. His jealousy has caused her to constantly arrive late to the upperworld and leave early, which means the upperworld is pretty much in a constant winter. Persephone is never up long enough for a successful harvest, so food is scarce. Torn between the two halves of her nature, Persephone has developed a drinking problem and her relationship with Hades is on the rocks. Orpheus hopes to fix all of this with his song.
Orpheus and Eurydice meet and fall in love. Eurydice sees the importance of Orpheus’s song and encourages him to work on it, but he is so engrossed in the song that he completely ignores their immediate material needs for food and firewood to keep warm. Now, instead of fighting just to take care of herself, Eurydice has to take care of herself and Orpheus with no help. The Fates taunt her at every turn. Eurydice also catches Hades’s eye. While she loves Orpheus, a life with a man that makes sure she wouldn’t want for anything is extremely attractive to a girl who has always wanted for everything. Finally, hungry and feeling completely out of other options, Eurydice agrees to Hades’s proposition and takes the train to Hadestown where she signs over her life to him and becomes trapped in the underworld.
When Orpheus finally finishes his song and comes up for air, he discovers that Eurydice is gone. Hermes tells him what happened and how to walk to the underworld to get her back. Orpheus undertakes the difficult journey to be reunited with his love. The reunion is joyous and beautiful until Orpheus discovers that Eurydice has signed her life over and cannot leave the underworld. He almost gives up in his quest but his faith in his love and his perseverance sparks a pseudo-labor uprising within Hadestown. Persephone persuades Hades to listen to Orpheus’s song. The song is beautiful and moving and repairs what is broken within their marriage. Persephone asks Hades to let Orpheus and Eurydice go, however, he is worried about saving face. If he just lets them go, he will be perceived by the other souls in Hadestown as soft and will not be able to maintain order, but it would be heartless of him not to let them go. The fates convince him to take a middle path where he agrees to let Eurydice and the other souls go, but Orpheus must lead them out of the underworld on foot and if he looks back at any point, the deal is off. As much as I wanted it to go differently this time, the play follows the original story and just as they reach the gates of the upperworld, Orpheus looks back and everything is ruined.
In the writing, I think Anaïs Mitchell does a really great job of setting Hades and Orpheus up as opposites. Hades is a rich man out for material gain. He is jealous and upset that he cannot fully possess his wife, so instead he looks to possess everything else and use those possessions as “a gilded cage” that he wants to hold Persephone in (44). In addition, the role is written for an actor with a very deep voice and Hades uses that voice very menacingly throughout the show. In the Original Broadway Cast Recording, I feel like the voice was so deep that I sometimes lost words in the song. On the other hand, Orpheus seems to usually be played by a more slim and gangly kind of character. He is so focused on his own need (finishing his song, even though he is altruistically trying to use it to save the world) that he doesn’t hold on to his wife tightly enough at all. Because of his lack of attention to and possessiveness of her, her needs go completely unmet until she feels like she has no choice but to leave. He is poor. He owns nothing and he does nothing but work on his song. All he can offer Eurydice is a dream for a better future. Most of his songs are much higher, to the point where I feel like in many productions the actor playing Orpheus isn’t singing comfortably and clarity and emotion both get lost along the way. My friend Dylan pointed out that the original West End Production of the show let Orpheus sing at a deeper octave and I feel like more emotion comes through and the words are more clear. (If you’re interested: West End Cast, Broadway Cast). Similarly, in the West End production, Hades sang a bit higher than he did in the Broadway production and I think that was also a better choice (West End, Broadway). In the touring production I saw last night, Ricky Cardenas played his Orpheus like the Original Broadway Cast Orpheus and Nickolaus Colón played Hades more like the West End Hades.
I was also impressed by the way sound effects are written into and performed in the show. The train to and from Hadestown is a big part of the show, and if you stop to think about the logistics, you will realize showing a train on stage is quite an undertaking. Instead of literally showing the train or piping in train sounds, Mitchell wrote the sounds into the songs. Using words and sounds, the cast mimics the sounds of a train and other than the occasional use of a train whistle Hermes has, the entire train effect is created with fog and human voices. Similarly, the industrial elements are a huge part of Hadestown. Instead of adding machinery to the set, all of the machine effects are created by the movements and vocalizations of the actors on stage at the time. It serves as the beat to several songs and I like the resourcefulness. I tend to be very impressed by more minimalist effects and using the cast to create elements of the show without adding a more technical element or bigger set pieces/props.
I’m not going to go very much farther into the actual music of the show because it’s not really my area of expertise, but I like the songs. The music covers a lot of genres. There are songs that give me a New Orleans Funeral Parade vibe, songs that sounded like something out of Spring Awakening (one of my favorite musicals), and songs that remind me of “Be Prepared” from The Lion King movie. My personal favorite song was “Why We Build the Wall” which falls into this last category for me (and is linked above). If this show were to have a “single,” it would definitely be “Wait for Me” and I haven’t been able to stop humming it since I heard it before intermission Sunday night. It’s beautiful but also catchy and fun to sing loudly when you’re home alone, and that’s really what every theater kid is looking for in a show.
The actual language of the show is gorgeous. In turns poetic and moving, but it also has room for moments of levity and clever word play. For instance when Eurydice and Orpheus first meet, she asks him, “A singer? Is that what you are?” and he replies “I also play the lyre.” Her response is, “Ooh, a liar, and a player too!” (13). I really enjoyed that exchange. Throughout the second act of the play, which takes place in the underworld, the workers repeat a refrain of “Oh, keep your head, keep your head low.” I thought that was really clever because we know these are industrial workers and Hades hints that he has a mining operation, so some of them may even be coal miners (to me they appeared to be dressed like 1930s coal miners). When you mined coal back in those days, you were often mining coal seams as small as 18 inches tall by hand. You literally had to keep your head low to do your work and keep your head. But at the same time, as we know from many stories involving the gods, and from Eurydice’s own story, you also are benefitted from keeping your head down and avoiding the notice of the gods. The fates noticed Eurydice early in her life and hound her throughout the play, and they are the ones that start to plant the doubt in Orpheus’s head which makes him turn around. She catches Hades’s eye when he comes to take Persephone back to Hadestown and because of that he appeals to her need for food and shelter and convinces her to sell him her life. If she had kept her head down and avoided notice throughout her life, she might have avoided a lot of the unpleasantness she experienced throughout the show.
The cast of the touring production is extremely talented and did a fabulous job of portraying all of the characters. I was impressed not only by the racial diversity of the cast but also in the diversity of body types. For example, Namisa Mdlalose Bizana, who played Persephone, is a full-figured woman but is still portrayed as sexy and desirable. Unfortunately, it seems whenever a woman who isn’t waif-like is in theater and cinema she’s just comic relief—I was glad to see this production break the mold. There were all kinds of builds in the cast and that added a level of realism and relatability to this cast that I really appreciated. The play was intentionally written so that each production could cast the show with a wide range of actors and I was happy to see how much this production embraced that option.
In this production, Orpheus, as I mentioned, was played by Ricky Cardenas, Julia Schick was playing Eurydice, and Darius J. Manuel was making his debut as Hermes. All three of these cast members are understudies for these roles and all three of them are “swings” (cast members who understudy for multiple roles). It seems like the cast is suffering through this flu season the same as the rest of us. I have been to plays where an understudy is playing a role and it is glaringly obvious throughout the show. Understudies are usually extremely talented, but sometimes the chemistry with the rest of the cast just hasn’t quite jelled and it comes through to the audience. That was not the case for this production. The Clay Center has switched to digital playbills and I didn’t get the QR code for the playbill until after the show, so I didn’t know who any of the actors were beforehand. Dylan tipped me off that Orpheus wasn’t going to be played by Bryan Munar (the lead for the touring company), so it wasn’t until I got home and had time to go through the playbill that I realized that Orpheus wasn’t the only role played by an understudy. However, if I hadn’t been tipped off, it never would have occurred to me.
The set for the touring production is pretty simple and remains mostly static throughout the show (some adjustments are made at intermission when the setting switches from the upperworld to Hadestown). This production is missing the rotating stage that it was known for on Broadway, but again, if I hadn’t known what I was looking for, I wouldn’t have missed it. Interestingly the band is on stage for the entire production and most of the cast also remains somewhere on stage for pretty much the entire show. What really set this play apart for me in terms of technical production was the lighting. Lighting is used to add a lot of depth and emphasis to the show. In the first big number after the intermission, big pendant lights come down from the ceiling and the actors swing them around for a really cool effect. As a theater-goer, I really loved the effect, but as a worrier, I was a little worried someone on stage was going to get smacked in the head and injured (thankfully no one did). At the end of the show as the group walks out of Hadestown led by Orpheus, the stage is almost completely dark and lanterns fade in and out as certain characters speak. In that way, the audience is really transported into the dark with the characters and it feels very immersive. The lighting was very well done.
If you ever have an opportunity, I highly recommend seeing this show. If you don’t get to see it, I still recommend listening to the soundtrack and reading the libretto. I listened and read simultaneously before going to the show and really enjoyed the experience.