‘Hadestown’ stares back against the maw of hopelessness

By Patrick O’Brien

As long as there's been musical theatre, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has made for irresistible source material. Thus, Hadestown, though as fresh a musical as any to open in the last decade, bears the weight and wisdom of centuries. And, lo, it aches, but what a wonderful ache it is: the ache of maybe. Maybe the boulder will stay perched at the top of the hill. Maybe the fruit will come into reach. Maybe, after burning summers and numbing winters that linger and intensify, a temperate spring will come.

And maybe this time, Orpheus won't turn around to look for Eurydice and they'll live happily ever after.

Audiences still gasp when he does turn around. And this after they've been told "it's a sad tale, a tragedy" at the top.

Writer Anaïs Mitchell didn't have to do anything special to get that reaction. Sure, with Rachel Chavkin as developer and director, she wrote an invigoratingly earthy and perceptive folk opera, wherein mirth and melancholy are but two sips of the same wine, but audiences are especially eager to suspend their disbelief and lean into Hadestown from the get-go. Is it because the primal power of the myth itself, the high romance of plunging into Hell in the name of Love? Is it because of the purity of its direct address, the bullshitlessness in its lack of fourth wall? Is it because Levi Kreis is just so ingratiating as our holy-roller narrator Hermes? Is it the siren call of Audrey Ochoa's blatty Nawlins trombone?

I don't really know any of these answers (except for Kreis and Ochoa, they're fantastic), but I keep coming back to this well through its cast album. Hadestown invites such meditation and re-visitation.
Actually, Mitchell has a few cards to play. Chiefly, she beefs up the myth's secondary couple, Hades and Persephone (Kevyn Morrow and Kimberly Madble, respectively). Normally the healthiest marriage in Greek mythology, here, they're on the rocks. Hades, reimagined as an industrial plutocrat, and increasingly afraid that Persephone will slip away one day, has turned the ever-flowing River Styx into an impenetrable brick wall. Persephone, bringer of the summer and the harvest, for her part is slipping into a distant drunken haze. Hence, a dejected Hades—not some random snake—slithers up and nabs Eurydice for his realm.

The Fates, too (Belén Moyano, Bex Odorisio, and Shea Renne, all bewitching) are also not above toying around with gods as they are men.

Indeed, Mitchell does so well by Hades, Persephone, et al, that Orpheus and Eurydice almost get short shrift, though Eurydice (Morgan Siobhan Green) does get a few self-determining feminist vertebrae out of it, and Orpheus (Nicholas Barasch) provides plenty of gorgeous falsetto acrobatics.

Gorgeous enough to crack open Rachel Hauck's set...

Perhaps I've said too much.

Hadestown will reward tenfold anyone's plunge into Hell. The ache of maybe will flair, as well it should in a world so blocked by walls. It's early March, after all—spring may yet come.

Hadestown runs through March 13th at the CIBC Theatre, 18 W. Monroe St. For tickets of more information, please call (800) 775-2000 or visit broadwayinchicago.com.

Photos by T. Charles Erickson.