Unlikely winter-warmer that turns out to be a near myth
Down the ages, artists from every field of endeavour have adored the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. As with the chilling German legend of Faust, what appeals is the piteous spectacle of self-damnation.
The “devil” figure – Hades, god of the underworld – gets his mitts on the fabled Thracian singer’s beloved Eurydice by exploiting human fallibility. The latter can be restored to life, and the world above ground, but only if Orpheus doesn’t look back as they make their return. Suspecting he has been duped, the youth can’t resist a peek and – damn it – she who means everything to him is lost forever.
“It’s an old song… we’re going to sing it again,” slow-croons the silversuited, grey-haired figure of Hermes (a spellbinding André De Shields) at the start of Hadestown, the National’s unlikely winter-warmer.
The show, by American singersongwriter Anaïs Mitchell, has already met with critical admiration in its New York tryouts, and is now getting Broadway-ready, courtesy of the UK’S biggest subsidised theatre. A win-win situation for all, in theory; the work’s long gestation period (it originated as a song-cycle in 2006) has resulted in an evening of evident cohesion and sophistication.
Those seeking “value for money” can’t complain given that they’re treated, over more than two hours, to song after well-sung, well-crafted song, a bumper-pack of bluesy, folksy, jazzy material that does the soul good. Or can they?
It’s not a problem that we know the tragic denouement that lies at the end of the tracks (the evening rumbles with a heavy train motif). More problematic is that the journey at times threatens to feel interminable. Compared to the ethical or emotional freight of, say, Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice and Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending, elaborate drama is in scarce supply.
Mitchell’s through-sung approach squeezes out opportunities for rich character-defining dialogue, with the principals (Reeve Carney’s Orpheus and Eva Noblezada’s Eurydice, a struggling musician and an impoverished traveller) losing themselves in the tale as it is retold. The ensemble approach is writ large in the simple framing device: we’re in an other-worldly bar-room environment, with hints of New Orleans, shades of the Depression in its period trappings and unavoidable echoes, too, of that Irish pub-set musical romance Once.
At the start, there’s a quality of joint-is-jumping uplift to the numbers (the band nicely populating the subtly tiered set), and a joy to seeing how present and past converge. Carney’s guitar-strumming Orpheus has a heavenly falsetto. Patrick Page’s Hades, the stock-type corporate villain of the piece (with money to burn, and lure Eurydice, thanks to his thinly sketched subterranean fossil-fuel empire) plumbs the depths with his growling bass. They’re poles apart, yet Mitchell points up parallels – a workaholism born of insecurity that toxifies their relationships with women (in Hades’s case, with Amber Gray’s frolicsome, bar-fly Persephone).
Before the stinging, melancholy payoff, an almost deadening repetition creeps in that Rachel Chavkin’s beautifully lit and propulsive production can’t quite mask. The revolves are used to giddy-making excess, and choreographer David Neumann is forced to think of 101 uses of bar-stools in a confined space. The show finally delivers the heartstopping goods, but is it fully achieved yet? A case, as with Orpheus himself, of so near, yet so far.