I’ve long been fascinated by the myth of Orpehus and Eurydice (hello Reflektor, back in the day; hello Portrait Of A Lady On Fire), and so, yes, I have been much anticipating getting to finally see Hadestown.
This feels as good a juncture as ever to mention that I don’t understand the people who listen to the soundtrack to a musical before you see it. It’s like reading the screenplay before seeing the film. Just watch it! Allow yourself to have the first experience of a piece of art be the real thing! Madness, all.
In any case, Hadestown is excellent and I can see why people are, indeed, listening to the soundtrack before they ever see the thing (of course, yes, in this instance it’s helped by Anais Mitchell making a concept album of it first, and so yes fine the lines are blurred, but this is my sandbox). It is obviously musically quite different to the norm - very bluesy, jazzy, Dixieland, etc. But, at the same time, it does still have to be a musical. It can’t just be those things, the songs have to be musical theatre songs, both in form (the melodies, the suitability for dance routines) and function (must have the I Want song in there).
The cast are all-round spectacular, but Grace Hodgett Young absolutely stole the show for me as Eurydice. Week one of the show, though, and Orpheus was being played by the understudy (Simon Oskarsson), who - fair play to the boy - I didn’t realise until after the show was indeed the understudy. He did a phenomenal job all things considered, and I hope he was happy with how it went.
It’s a tricky piece to play, narratively. How do you end it? The myth itself is naturally pretty bleak (I mean, no spoilers, it’s however many hundreds of years old), but you can’t end on that, can you? Can you? In the end Hadestown doesn’t, but neither does it end on an outright happy or unearned ending. It lands somewhere genuinely heartfelt and positive, without undermining itself. A fantastic show.