The tragic love of Orpheus and Eurydice is intertwined with the complex relationship of Hades and Persephone. Eurydice, struggling with poverty, is lured to the industrial underworld of Hadestown b...
So….my friend Gabby, you know the one I saw both Wicked films with, the one who cried at the curtain call both times with me, the theater queen herself—her absolute favorite musical (let alone the one she stated literally saved her life) just got the full Hamilton treatment: a fully filmed stage production given a full theatrical release. The musical in question? “Hadestown.” And despite being somewhat of a Greek mythology junkie, my knowledge of this musical is embarrassingly limited. Now, I’ve picked up pieces of it over the years—fragments, sure. A song here, one of Gabby’s heavenly FaceTime sermons there. But the whole thing? Not once.
So I figured what better way to celebrate her 27th birthday than for Gabby to transform into Persephone for the 8,000th time and drag her best friend, her Orpheus with us?
I GET IT NOW.
Similar to Alesha Harris with Is God Is, Rachel Chavkin’s direction is one THAT intimately connected and woven into the fabric of what she makes; the only difference here is Rachel’s meticulous storyboarding breeds a different kind of rhythmic harmony and almost geological sense of space and patience that further illuminates the musicality and musicianship of this piece of musical theater. The tectonic grace and precision she drills into her direction already grips us, but by collaborating with Brett Sullivan, that precision blooms and blossoms into something feverish and pulsating.
I thought David Korins’s production design for Hamilton had me gushing and giggling like a schoolgirl, but Rachel Hauck somehow overdelivered and exceeded even that for this….and the maddening thing is it’s intentionally off-putting. Sublimely merging two worlds disguised as one set and refusing to anchor it all down to any particular setting and time period means there’s a constant, restless shift of dynamism moving throughout. It’s ambitious through its ambiguity and vice versa, and the minimalist tavern that has to house multiple shifting locations weaponizes that very lack of space with its own single-stage Anthropocene setting, blending this rustic, old-time southern bar atmosphere with a dark, industrial factory feel and expansive scope and scale while making the setting not too elaborate or overblown.
I’m looking at this presentation through two lenses. As a proshot, there’s a real deference to the stage production, a willingness to just let it breathe that never feels passive yet still leverages moments where film can do what film does best. But on its own, it essentially opens the Greek mythology outward, stretching out beyond this proscenium in a way that makes these ancient stories feel dangerously, thrillingly alive. Clayton Jacobson has a delicacy to his camerawork and composition that aligns with and serves the vision Rachel and Brett mapped out; Floating almost like a ghost in the wings, his cinematography harbors this documentary-like intimacy to how he crystallizes the negative space between every single beat, and all of its angles and close-ups are deployed with restraint and spare poise, resulting in sublime blocking and precision from and around both the initial props and performers. Not to mention, the lighting from Bradley King is fucking immaculate with how sophisticated and deliberate it is to every slight subtlety.
And for not being flashy, the combined editing from Marko Keser and David Tregoning never announces itself, which is exactly how you know it’s doing its job—the whole thing flows without a single visible seam, even when the occasional cutaway pulls you away from the stage and sacrifices a few pivotal moments.
You cannot imagine how conflicted I felt about the pacing at first; it felt “off”, misaligned, never quite sluggish but not yet fully itself. And then, somewhere I couldn’t pinpoint, it just clicked open. Very brisk with this relentless, almost locomotive momentum, it eventually lands on this steady, hypnotic rhythm that never lets its foot off the gas… even if it does prove occasionally cloying, and I got confused over one particular song placement. Still, I’m splitting hairs on a head that barely has any. Its tight focus goes in sync with the geological staging, David Neumann’s choreography was never going to be showy or flashy like Hamilton but what it lacks in style it makes up for with naturalistic gestures to reflect the struggle between nature and machinery, and despite the universality and familiarity of both myths, the tension and suspense coiled in my stomach like a live wire, fresh as if I was experiencing them for the first time. For long stretches, I nearly forgot this was a Greek tragedy, and when the inevitable eventually loomed into view, my hands stayed clamped over my mouth in restless unease.
If you’re going to make a musical with this much mythology, emotional weight, and sheer ambition, you cannot afford to fumble the music. And Anaïs Mitchell doesn’t fumble a single note; her eclectic New Orlean’s 1930’s jazz bleeding into Depression-esque folk bleeding into something that sounds unmistakably, thrillingly modern Broadway, genre after genre arriving and dissolving like weather. They all bleed into each other to where the score and the songs essentially create their own kind of world-building and mythology within the mythology itself; every lyrical motif, play-on-words and melody being a clever mirror to genius characterization hidden in plain sight. Nearly every facet of the sound design adds to the prophetic quality of the lyrics while being intimately haunting in equal measure, and Michael Krass’s costume design is exquisite in its simplicity, molded through the 1930’s and clearly show the economic status and personality of each character while being both extravagantly retro and subtly unsubtle.
At the risk of me beating a dead horse with another dead horse, I could spend the rest of this review doing nothing but cataloguing these performances and still walk away feeling like I shortchanged them. Every single one speaks for itself, each performer hauling their character well past what the original myth ever asked of them—which is fortunate, because these characters demand it, wound together with far more intricacy and involution beyond the natural confines that their ancient counterparts could ask for.
Andre de Shields brings Hermes to life with this effortless, unhurried elegance—picture a disgruntled elder watching the youths make the same mistakes he’s seen a thousand times over and still showing up anyway—and though Patrick Page’s voice has weathered some since the production first opened in 2019, what remains is still formidable, anchoring Hades in both a booming voice and a physicality that looms and shifts like something tectonic. But Amber Gray as Persephone? Hot damn, she’s the best performer in this and its not even close; equal parts exuberant, somber, rough-edged and world-weary, she plays effusive brashness and drunk divinity like it’s the only honest religion left with physical comedy that echoes the elastic, boneless quality of Jim Carrey and a gorgeous, vocal raspiness that mirrors Danny DeVito. She ate and left no crumbs because she was savoring every bite.
Eva Noblezada supercharges her Eurydice with a lot more agency and traumatized devotion with a voice of ardent richness, and while Reeve Carney is the most unremarkable one in comparison to the rest of his costars, there’s something so interestingly uninteresting about his Orpheus that Reeve somehow pours just enough softness and naivety into to make him relatable and interesting.
Once I realized what I was in for, I knew this was the type of story I’d been dying to sink my teeth into all year. A narrative cherrypicking certain chapters of the central relationships between Orpheus, Eurydice, Hades, and Persephone and mixing both separate myths to create perhaps the ultimate intertwining parallel romantic saga, the way it catches you up not merely in those stories it tells but in the vivacious, spilling-over-the-sides structure of the show’s design unlocks a very distinct echo of something ancient and new while also interrogating the myths to some extent. Despite giving off the impression of a glorified concert more than an actual music/plot-driven show amongst all the different moving parts, it still moves along like a well-oiled machine and the doubling of the narratives creates this devastating resonance that builds and builds until you’re not watching two tragic love stories but one fractured whole, split across time and temperament.
It might as well be theatrical alchemy how well these myths had been taken and reactivated through the sheer friction of musical storytelling. Expanded from the original concept album, both love stories are metabolized, digesting centuries of myth down to the marrow of what actually drives people toward each other and then slowly, irreversibly apart. Both lovers have doubts about the idealized world the other sees and envisions because they take their respective worlds either for what they are or for something they think they can morph for the other’s sake; whether it be naive, artificial, hopeful, or ruthless, the lengths they all go either to preserve their love, or squash their fear of losing said love unveils a deeply human terror beyond consequences and doubt….but also how the real world shapes our fictions and how those fictions aim to shape the real world in return.
On top of that clever enough conceit to the book here, it’s one of those texts that actually reward repeat viewings and keeps giving with each fresh rewatch, peeling back more layers on details you missed or developing themes with each revisit. Climate change, fascism, capitalism, immigration, old marriage, young love, fate, free will, poverty, class politics, false sense of security, the walls we build for ourselves to keep people out or in, the repetitive cyclical nature of storytelling, the strength/burden of art—and those are just what I was able to pick up on. It evokes the news and reality of today so powerfully despite being written back during the Bush Administration and our failure to learn from past events in history damns us to repeat these mistakes and thus, make this story timeless and even more culturally relevant for years to come. Fear and love prove to be a balanced duality in this musical, the ultimate contradiction of humanity meant to displace doubt and cynicism about the truth while also reinforcing it; they rob us of reason and in the name of them, we commit terrible atrocities and call them acts of self-preservation; self-destructive but understandable in equal measure. Even when you can pick out the exact moments where the transparency peeks through the poetry, Mitchell never lets the didacticism or her thesis curdle into sermon because of how seamlessly those well-intentions breathe through everyone and everything.
The wall isn’t just a wall; it’s every wall, and the musical knows you know this, trusting you to carry that weight without needing the map; hell, it makes all of the songs hit differently now, post-2024, post-everything, and I kept thinking about how Gabby must have felt hearing those lyrics for the first time during darker personal chapters, how art can sometimes arrive exactly when you need it to perform emotional surgery you didn’t know you required.
Perhaps what struck me the most was the ending; more specifically, the refusal of the easy catharsis of tragedy that comes with it. Just the way it crescendos into that gut-punch of a denouement which pulls triple-duty as uplifting tragedy, Pyrrhic victory and a meta-textual call to action simultaneously leaves you with this quiet, devastating weight of “Of course. Of course it ends this way”. Orpheus might’ve brought back the seasons but Eurydice is still damned forever, the workers are still not free, capitalism and exploitation still thrive and will continue to fix the game against everyone. He couldn’t change everything but he changed enough to make us believe we can bring the world around into what it should be, to showcase why this story continues to be told over and over again with the explicit hope that just ONE of these retellings will give us a cathartic happy ending.
This very disillusionment not only deliberately puts the control back into the character’s hands but also, by extension, our hands as the audience to change the way the world is….but only if we can properly stand together as individuals to do so.
Everything you’ve heard about “Hadestown” is indeed true—it’s all warranted, all necessary, all earned. Not merely a filmed stage production; it’s a transmission from a seemingly simple folk tale about love and doubt metastasizing into something far more knotted and uncomfortable, something deeper that understands the cyclical nature of human failure, the stubborn, irrational persistence of hope, and a thorny meditation on how or IF we truly survive systems designed to consume us whole. Nothing probably will beat seeing this live on stage….but I understand now why Gabby credits this musical for saving her life; she was right to weep, she was right to rejoice, she was right to call this salvation.
If by any chance you fancy dragging me back down to the underworld, I’ll be here…..and I’ll be waiting.
