‘Hadestown’ gorgeous at Proctors
Tony-winning production retells Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice
SCHENECTADY — As gorgeous to the eye as to the ear, “Hadestown” is a gift that lovers of music, theater and musical theater owe themselves if they don’t already have tickets before the touring production ends its run at Proctors on Sunday after opening on Tuesday night.
Though the story is not quite a tale as old as time, it goes back millennia, to Greek myths, and that may be how long the development process occasionally seemed to folk singer Anais Mitchell. She wrote the music, book and lyrics for the show, which began life in a Barre, Vt., theater in 2006, before she recorded it as a concept album in 2010. Mitchell started working a few years later with the stage director Rachel Chavkin for a 2016 off-broadway production, and they significantly revamped it for Broadway, where it opened in 2019 and is still running.
If quality art takes time, so be it. In the case of “Hadestown,” the yearslong investment returns richness in story and song, performed by an onstage ensemble that totals 20: eight principal roles, five chorus members and seven onstage instrumentalists, including a stellar trombonist who also plays glockenspiel and is the assistant conductor (Emily Fredrickson). There’s enough talent in the road company that a last-minute performer substitution, causing a 20minute starting delay Tuesday, was undetectable from the audience. (A Proctors representative said the replacement was cellist Natalie Spehar, stepping in for the ailing Kely Pinheiro.)
Mitchell adapted the story of a young couple popular in many mythical stories, Orpheus and Eurydice; the former is the ward of the god Hermes, who functions as the show’s narrator, and the latter is the impoverished young woman he falls in love with. Their romance seems doomed when Eurydice is convinced by Hades and a trio of meddlesome Fates to trade her freedom for the promise of safety and security in the underworld, where Hades rules with his wife, Persephone.
Believing he can free his beloved with