This spring in New York City, Hadestown is being celebrated as a feat of storytelling at the not-obvious-until-now intersection between Broadway, Greek mythology, and folk music. Penned by Anaïs Mitchell, the production is sung-through on a rolling landscape of New Orleans-infused roots music, strung so seamlessly together that it feels like one long song.
It’s been nominated for 14 Tony Awards this year — worth celebrating in the folk world, considering the other accomplishments of its writer include a duo recording of songs from the collection of Francis James Child and a handful of stunning singer-songwriter albums. But what’s folkier than telling a timeless tale in hopes that we can learn something new about where we are and where we’re going? And, like most myths and folk songs, Hadestown seems to have been around almost forever.
“I never dreamed I’d be working on this thing for as long as I have!” Mitchell tells the Bluegrass Situation. “But there have been so many different chapters of it — the early stage show in Vermont, the studio album, the touring of the studio album with guest singers, the six years of development in New York with [director] Rachel Chavkin (and four productions in and out of town). Other artists, designers, actors, have kept the wind in my sails and in the sails of the piece itself.”
She adds, “When I finally had to let go of changing lyrics because we were close to opening night, I was walking outside the theater after a show and saw this crowd of kids waiting at the stage door to talk to the actors, some of them dressed as characters from our show. I had this moment of grace and humility and the deep realization that this thing has never been about me and the writing of it; it has always been so much bigger. The story is older than any of us and resonates in ways I will never understand. So I guess what I’m getting at is, my feeling about the mystery, the muse, the crazy challenging beautiful act of collaboration — all those things are as mystical to me as they’ve ever been.”
The story of Hadestown brings into parallel two love stories from Greek mythology: Orpheus and Eurydice alongside Hades and Persephone. In Mitchell’s narrative, both couples are torn in some way by doubt and fear. Orpheus (Reeve Carney) is the musician working on a song to change the world; Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) is the daring girl who falls in love with him. Hades (Patrick Page) is the king of the underworld and his wife Persephone (Amber Grey) is the plucky goddess who brings the spring and summer before returning to Hades’s side when the seasons change.
Mitchell told an audience recently that the whole thing came to her many years ago, as just “some lyrics [that] came into my head that seemed to be about this story.”
“Orpheus is this impossible optimist,” she explains. “[He’s] this dreamer who believes that he can write a song beautiful enough that he can change the way the world is, can change the rules of the world.”
Hadestown premiered as a community theater production in Vermont in 2006. Four years later, Mitchell made it an album where she sang as Eurydice and Justin Vernon was Orpheus. Greg Brown was Hades, Ani DiFranco was Persephone, Ben Knox Miller was Hermes, and the Haden Triplets were the Fates. As a folk album, Hadestown was anachronistic if not delightfully disorienting. Its songs all stood on their own, especially the lusciously navel-gazing “Flowers” and the provocative, accidentally topical “Why Do We Build the Wall?” They were each arrestingly understated, driven by the turns of the singer’s voice and the prosody in Mitchell’s lyrics.
Mitchell toured around, performing the album with a rotating cast of local singer-songwriters wherever she went. In 2012 she began a collaboration with Chavkin (Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812) and since then Hadestown has journeyed from a small thrust stage at New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village, to a larger proscenium stage in Edmonton, Alberta, then to the National Theater in London, and finally to Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater.
Tipping a hat to the show’s folksinger origins, Orpheus really plays his acoustic guitar, the Fates wander with fiddle and squeezebox, people step to the mic when they want to emphasize what they’re singing about, and at the top of the second act, Persephone introduces the band. These elements help to set the show apart in a theater world where audiences are used to respecting a hard fourth wall.
“I come from the songwriter/music world,” Mitchell says, “and I’m very comfortable just hanging out for three or four minutes in a song with verses, choruses, maybe a bridge, digging the suspension of time and the cyclical beauty of music. So there’s been a super-slow learning curve for me in terms of how to take a song like ‘Wedding Song’ and put it in service of the kind of moment-to-moment storytelling we desire and expect from the theater. Especially because Hadestown is a sung-through piece, we needed the songs to work harder as scenes with stakes, events, and results for the characters.”
She continues, “Many of the songs for Hadestown existed as a kind of poetic portraiture and it took cracking them open, adding intros, interludes, bridges and outros, check-ins with other characters, to make them do that work. The addition of ‘Come Home with Me,’ which I rewrote one million times, in which Orpheus expresses his mission to ‘bring the world back into tune’ with song, and then especially the interlude where he debuts his ‘Epic’ melody and it has an effect on the world — flower magic! — really helped it feel like, when we got to the end of that song, something had changed. For Orpheus, for Eurydice, and for the audience.”
The Broadway incarnation is replete with these kinds of turning points and bringing them to fruition has meant a lot of rewriting for Mitchell. Thus, some of the songs that made sense on the album are no longer included, and some of the characters have evolved as well.
“I got feedback after almost every production we did about the Orpheus character not being in-focus enough,” Mitchell says. “He’s been the hardest character by far to write, I think because of all the characters in the show, he’s pure, an idealist, a believer, and everyone else has a sort of jaded or ruined quality which is easier for audiences to ‘buy.’ In earlier productions, because he’s this irrationally faithful character, mythologically speaking, and because of how he was written, he came across kind of cocky, overconfident, not the underdog hero we want to pull for.
“Finally, between London and Broadway, I really started massaging him into more of an innocent, naive character, an artist ‘touched by the gods’ who can see the way the world could be but has a hard time living in the world that is. That new character was very intuitive to Reeve [Carney], who is himself a very pure spirit. It felt right for Orpheus to be more of a mentee, an acolyte, a boy ‘under the wing’ of Hermes, the storyteller.
“So Hermes became much more of an uncle figure, more intimately involved in the story and its stakes than before. At the same time Eurydice was becoming more focused — and Eva [Noblezada] also brought so much intuitive toughness and humor to the role — as a runaway, a girl with a past, and demons that won’t leave her be. The Fates became, quite often, the voices in her head. I think those more meta storyteller characters each have a more pointed allegiance [on Broadway] to the character they hope will act out their world views.”
Further, the set has evolved: it is a barroom, a small world that feels both familiar and familial. But when we enter the underworld, the set becomes darker, cavernous. Though it physically expands, the result somehow feels heavier, more enclosed.
“We could see the effect that Orpheus’s divine music has on the world,” she says. “In the case of ‘Wait for Me,’ … the way to the underworld reveals itself to him. It’s a moment where I feel like all the design departments were bringing so much inspiration. … We go from a very warm, safe, round place, to a place that is suddenly terrifyingly large. It’s all of a sudden cold. There’s steel, those industrial lights go up and up and up. I find it very visually moving every time.”
There’s also a lift and turntable in the stage that add to the journeying portions of the show. Nowhere are the set changes more powerful than in the stunning, breath-stopping delivery of “Wait for Me” and its reprise in Act II. In the latter, Eurydice and Orpheus switch places in their travail of trust and doubt, singing with a workers’ chorus whose presence adds new depth to the show.
“The Workers were always a part of the story conceptually,” Mitchell says, “but at New York Theater Workshop we didn’t have space or budget for an ensemble, so that ‘role’ was taken on by the entire company. When we began to build in the dedicated choral, choreographic presence of the Workers, it really expanded a lot of things. ‘Wait for Me II,’ for example, gains a lot of momentum because suddenly the implications of Orpheus and Eurydice’s walk are bigger than the two of them.”
“Wait for Me II” is where the intersections of song, story, myth, folk tradition, and theatrical allegory become writ-large in the narrative. We’re reminded that a song, created as the expression of an individual, can encourage many others to follow new paths — or as the posters outside the theater say, help us “see how the world can be.”
“People inspire each other in ways no one will ever understand,” Mitchell says. “No one is coming up with any of this shit from scratch. We are standing on the backs of our ancestors and we’re singing to and for each other. The other very meta thing about letting go of the piece for Broadway was [recognizing] nothing is ever perfect. We don’t love Orpheus because he’s perfect. He’s flawed, he falls short, and we love him anyway. We love him for trying. There is goodness in the endeavor itself, whatever the outcome is.”
Lede image: Reeve Carney and Eva Noblezada
Secondary image: Amber Gray, Patrick Page, and Reeve Carney
Photo credit: Matthew Murphy
In the 1940s, this was one of the first nightclubs to feature folk music. The great protest and folk singer Josh White held court at Café Society for five years. Billie Holiday and Lester Young were regular performers in what was one of the first clubs to truly break color barriers. When Dylan lived here in 1962, it was the Haven — one of New York’s largest openly gay nightclubs.
Keep heading toward Dylan’s apartment and then turn right on Jones Street.
This is the street from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album cover. Take some photos and continue down the street — at the end is Caffe Vivaldi. Pop in for a beer. It’s a great place to hear some burgeoning New York musicians, as it is still home to songwriters and one of the only clubs with a piano. It’s a great old room.
This room has a rich history. It was first the Commons. Opened in 1958, the Commons was originally a small theater and café that was tres bohemian. It was also one of the first basket houses — a coffee shop that had live music — in Greenwich Village. The performers were paid in tips, which were collected in a passed basket. The Commons expanded in 1960 and changed its name to the Fat Black Pussycat. This is where Dylan wrote "Blowin' in the Wind."
Dylan performed at Café Wha? on his first day in New York. It was an open mic hosted by Fred Neil. Fred Neil is best remembered as the songwriter behind “Everybody’s Talking” from the film Midnight Cowboy. In 1961, he managed the café’s day bookings and MC’d the open mic. Dylan did a set of Woody Guthrie songs and Neil hired him on the spot as his harmonica player.
This café is virtually unchanged from the day it opened. Without a doubt, Dylan spent time here. You might also recognize it from the film Inside Llewyn Davis. Caffe Reggio also claims to be the birthplace of the cappuccino.
The Gaslight was the place to play in the 1960s. It was the Carnegie Hall of folk music, where Dave Van Ronk hosted the weekly hootenanny every Monday and Dylan was one of the regular performers within a year of moving to town. There were typically five performers each night and they would rotate every four songs. It is a tiny spot, and there would be lines stretched down the block. Before being converted to the Gaslight, this was the coal room for the building. The walls were stained black from years of storage, but the room embraced it and left it dark. It’s also been rumored that this is where the beatniks began snapping instead of clapping, so as not to disturb the upstair tenants.
This is the former Kettle of Fish. When not performing, the musicians would eat and play cards up here.
Izzy Young from the Beatnik Riots was the proprietor. Dylan referred to the Folklore Center as “The Citadel of American Folk Music.” Izzy was a notoriously bad businessman, but his folklore center was the hub of the New York folk revival. Van Ronk, and countless other musicians, were technically homeless — although they always had a place to crash. This was where their mail was sent. It was also where Dylan came to absorb records and learn new songs.
Continue to 152 Bleecker Street where the old Café Au Go Go is now a Capital One Bank. Café Au Go Go was a cultural hotbed in the 1960s hosting folk, jazz, comedy, blues, and rock. The Grateful Dead played their first New York show at Café Au Go Go. A young Joni Mitchell had a weekly gig. Blues legends Lightnin' Hopkins, Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and Big Joe Williams performed at the club after being "rediscovered" in the '60s. Young Bob Dylan spent many nights listening to his peers and forefathers.
This is where Dylan came up with the Rolling Thunder Review. When he moved back to Greenwich Village in the '70s, he spent many nights at the Bitter End. There were many late-night jam sessions and, one night, he decided to take this loose collective on the road. He recruited some of his famous friends, hired a film crew, and embarked on one of the most ambitious tours of the 1970s. The Bootleg Series put out an amazing double album, and Heavy Rain was recorded on this tour. If you’ve ever seen Dylan in white face with a pimp hat, it was from the Rolling Thunder Review.
