HADESTOWN DEBUTS
Broadway-bound musical begins its run at Citadel
There is a reason myths stick around. Forever and always, there is a villain to be vanquished, and a love story to believe in.
The myth that roots Hadestown, which made its Canadian debut Thursday at the Citadel, is that of Orpheus, the charming musician, and Eurydice, his beautiful bride. The ancient Greek myth involves death by snake bite and a speedy descent for Eurydice to the underworld. But in the reimagined version by Anaïs Mitchell, Eurydice does not die, but chooses to leave her lover.
Though he is both handsome and hopeful, seeing the brutal world not as it is, but as it could be, Orpheus is frankly underemployed. Eurydice is cold and she is hungry. When Hades, the king of the underworld, offers to buy her a ticket to a place that’s warm and prosperous, Eurydice turns her back on love in exchange for security.
That’s all the audience really needs to know to begin its journey with Hadestown, which plays at the Shoctor till Dec. 3 after a critically acclaimed 2016 run at the New York Theatre Workshop. The show is in the midst of working its way onto Broadway, possibly by the spring of 2018.
I would advise theatre lovers to get on board with this production immediately, because it’s not often Edmonton enjoys a performance crafted by cast and crew members of this lustre. Broadway greats including Patrick Page (Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, A Man for All Seasons) and Kingsley Leggs (The Colour Purple, Sister Act) are on stage alongside actor and musician Reeve Carney (Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Penny Dreadful) as well as T.V. Carpio (another Spider-Man alumna) and Amber Gray (Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812). The show’s lighting director Bradley King, won a Tony earlier this year for his work on the Broadway hit, Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. His work in Hadestown is hypnotic.
But the show owes its transparent heart to creator, New York musician Anaïs Mitchell, and its expert execution to Tony-nominated director Rachel Chavkin (Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812). Hadestown began its life in 2010 as a 20-song concept album by Mitchell. Seven years later, with another dozen songs added to the powerful collection of tunes you’ll see at the Shoctor, Mitchell’s creation offers both a political critique of power, past and present, and her own empathetic take on love gone wrong.
But it’s Chavkin’s treatment of the material, which moves from muscular to delicate and back throughout the 135-minute production, that renders the show both soulful and spectacular. It thrums and writhes. At times, the pace is sensual, and at other times the production rattles and pops like the second line of a brassy New Orleans street funeral. (The seven-piece band, by the way, made up of top Edmonton musicians and lead by New York musical director Liam Robinson, tears the place apart.)
Key to the evening’s illustration is its narrator, Hermes, the hobo crooner played by Kingsley Leggs. He introduces us to our characters, and their struggle.
“It’s a tale of love that never dies, it’s a love song, about someone who tries,” says Hermes.
First up is Persephone, the long-suffering wife of Hades, played by the vibrant Amber Gray, whose expressive face and supple limbs trace the emotional tenor of the piece with remarkable accuracy. She’s been married for far too long to Hades, and is only truly alive when she wanders above ground, heralding spring, six months a year.
But Persephone must always return in winter to Hadestown, where her husband waits at the train station.
“You’re early,” she says with disappointment when he greets her.
“I missed ya,” says Hades, in the best coal-black, gravelstrewn bass clef since Darth Vader.
Naturally, we are drawn to the young lovers. As a modern-day Eurydice, T.V. Carpio is in charge of her own life, but like so many of us, is dogged by voices whispering doubt in her ear in the form of three tuneful Fates (Kira Guloien, Jewelle Blackman and Evangelia Kambites).
When she is seduced by Hades during Hey Little Songbird (with its chilling, Harvey Weinstein undertones) and descends via an elevator that’s really a cage into Hadestown, we can see by the tragic look on her face that it was a mistake.
The audience thrills when the young lovers are reunited, briefly, and are given the opportunity to leave together, and gasps aloud when Orpheus cannot trust that Eurydice will follow him above ground, where it will be spring someday.
Reeve Carney, with his boyband good looks and ballad style, was a puzzle to me in the show’s first half. His approach, more romantic troubadour than Broadway belter, took time to gain ground, and his appeal to Eurydice was somewhat unclear. (Though he was obviously an excellent kisser, and often that’s enough.) He emerged fully in the second half, however, particularly in his compelling pitch to let Eurydice leave the underground. (“And suddenly Hades was only a man, With a taste of nectar upon his lips.”)
The staging is deceptive in its simplicity, and dominated by double turntables. The circular sections often spiral in opposite directions, contributing to the tension between choices available to the characters. Sometimes we feel as if we are on a carousel with the cast, which goes up and down, and round and round, but never gets anywhere. At other times, the turntables evoke a factory floor, where workers toil ceaselessly in lock step, heads down, their muscles visible through the dirt and sweat.
New York choreographer David Neumann does a tremendous job with the Workers Chorus, four new characters that have been added since the New York Theatre Workshop run. The addition of the Workers (played in the Citadel production by Edmonton’s own Vance Avery, Toronto’s Andrew Broderick, Leduc-born Hal Wesley Rogers and Calgary’s Tara Jackson) adds heft and a visceral thrill to the production.
In my pedantic way, I have always been a stickler for musicals with songs that drift through your brain long after the show is over.
Hadestown has several that caught my heart, even as I write this 12 hours later, including the poignant Wait For Me, and the raunchy trombone infused Hadestown, the perfect anthem for a speakeasy. All I’ve Ever Known (“is how to hold my own”) feels right for anyone who has ever struggled to give into to a relationship.
This narrative is strong (which is why it’s nice to get your hooks into a myth). But Mitchell’s music and lyrics infuse an old tale with new meaning, and it’s a story we never tire of pondering. Hadestown weaves between hope and despair, winter and spring. It’s our carousel. We are up, we are down.
Love, indeed life, stops, but it doesn’t end.