`OK, HERE WE GO'
Ani Difranco on Broadway? She's wrapping her head around it
As a longtime denizen of the music industry's DIY underworld, Ani Difranco tends to relish a madefrom-scratch ethos. So it's no surprise that the 53-year-old singer-songwriter eschews bells and whistles onstage, instead underscoring each concert she performs with a go-with-the-flow esthetic.
That means Difranco shuffles the set list, freshens the storytelling and shapes the performance to the venue, be it a crusty dive bar or a soft-seater theatre.
Speaking during a recent video chat, Difranco sums up her vibe with a hushed confession.
“I'm kind of anti-theatre,” she concedes, “in my Ani game.”
Which makes her latest endeavour — starring as the Greek goddess Persephone in the Broadway musical Hadestown — an ironic interlude. Difranco is no stranger to the production: Her indie label, Righteous Babe, produced the 2010 Hadestown concept album that spawned the Tony-winning stage show, and she sang the part of Persephone. As Hadestown creator Anaïs Mitchell puts it, Difranco has long been the project's “fairy godmother.”
Difranco notes that she did dance in her youth until, as a broke 18-year-old moving from Buffalo to New York City, she realized she couldn't afford the classes. But Difranco had never acted before making her Broadway bow last month. So finding her place in the Hadestown machinery has been a trial by fire for a challenge-chasing performer who now goes to hell and back eight times a week.
“I very much don't have that theatre bone in my body,” Difranco says. “Over the course of the rehearsals, I had to say, `Whoa, all right — you have to find that bone, Ani. You have to bring it to the surface and you have to use it. You don't come out and sniff the air and divine the spirits. You come out swinging. You come out with the thing that you came to deliver.'”
After Difranco circumvented the mainstream recording industry and founded Righteous Babe Records in 1990, at age 19, she forged a reputation as a feminist trailblazer, a queer icon and the mother of the “do it yourself ” music movement. The independence gave Difranco free rein to express herself artistically, blending autobiographical musings with sociopolitical commentary on albums that ran the sonic gamut from punk rock to spoken-word poetry.
One early Difranco devotee: Mitchell, the indie folk maestro who penned Hadestown's book, music and lyrics. “I maybe picked up the guitar because I wanted to play like her,” recalls Mitchell, 42.
Mitchell was just starting to make a name for herself in the mid-aughts when she booked a gig at the Buffalo bar Nietzsche's and, following her first set, realized Difranco was in the house. As Difranco remembers it, “I was struck by her immediately. My first instinct was, `Let me help this girl. Let me get behind this girl.'”
Thus Righteous Babe came to sign Mitchell and release her next three projects — including the Hadestown concept album. Although Difranco wasn't available to personally produce the record, she recommended Todd Sickafoose, her band's longtime bassist, for the role and agreed to voice Persephone.
Described by Mitchell as a “benevolent party girl,” Hades's estranged wife splits her time in Hadestown between the cold, industrial underworld and the ragged land above, where her arrival is accompanied by prosperity, warmth and plenty of wine. All the while, she looks out for the troubadour Orpheus and his love, Eurydice, as poverty and Hades's duplicity pull them apart.
“There was something about Ani playing Persephone that felt really right,” Mitchell says.
Difranco sang as Persephone during subsequent concert performances of Hadestown before ceding the role as Mitchell and director Rachel Chavkin embarked on a trio of tryout productions and the show at last opened on Broadway in April 2019. Hadestown went on to win eight Tonys, survive the pandemic pause and become the longest-running show at the nearly century-old Walter Kerr Theatre. As the cast turned over, with the final original stars departing this past fall, Mitchell pushed to bring Difranco back to the fold.
Revisiting songs she performed a decade and a half ago came naturally enough. But tackling the subsequently written tunes, which were first recorded by original Broadway cast member Amber Gray, became an exercise in restraint after she found her initial instinct “was a little too Ani-fied.”
Breaking into Broadway hasn't slowed Difranco's musical output. She released the politically charged single Baby Roe last month and plans to drop her 23rd album — a production-heavy collaboration with producer BJ Burton — in the spring.
“It's a bit of a departure, sonically,” Difranco teases. “I wanted to take a more modern approach.” A mother of two, she also wrote a civic-duty-centric children's book, Show Up and Vote, that's set to hit shelves in August.