John C. Reilly Is Mister Romantic

As John C. Reilly cavorts around a converted Brooklyn warehouse, his wiry hair branching heavenward, he looks a bit like a heavily rouged version of his eccentric Dr. Steve Brule. But Dr. Brule isn’t here, and neither is Reilly, in a sense. A fellow named Mister Romantic holds court instead, serenading and chatting up audience members in an effort to win their hearts. He swoons and croons, he has a microphone that looks like a rose, and he really, really wants to be loved forever, lest he be doomed to an eternity in a steamer trunk.

Reilly is the rare sort of actor whose talents span cutting dramas and gut-busting comedy antics, and underneath all of it, he’s maintained a soft spot for musical theater. Audiences have gotten a peek at that in Reilly’s Oscar-nominated embodiment of Chicago’s “Mister Cellophane,” and while he’s hammed it up as Dewey Cox in Walk Hard. He’s long nurtured his musicianship, too, with a handful of bands in his youth, a blues outfit, and his more recent cadre of bluegrass friends.

After finishing his duties as Jerry Buss in Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Reilly fixed his energy on finding some sort of remedy to the discord that he felt dominating everyday life. Mister Cellophane only got the one song, as Reilly has noted, so he drew upon more than twenty years of his own tune-collecting to develop a repertoire that felt suited to his mission and was close to his own heart. He’s pulled most of his material from the early 20th century body of the American Songbook, which Reilly expands to include a handful of Tom Waits numbers. Though Mister Romantic works a special kind of magic in person, he issued a baker’s dozen of recordings on his album What’s Not to Love? in mid-June, a more permanent evidence of his visitation.

He credits Los Angeles’ famed venue Largo with being the nexus of countless creative relationships – including Mister Romantic compatriots like David Garza, fiddler Gabe Witcher, and Sebastian Steinberg, who joins the ensemble on their recordings. The crew keep remarkably stony faces as Reilly improvises his appeals to the crowd, part of the story built around Mister Romantic’s cosmic arc: “He’s been traveling in this box for thousands of years trying to find love, and he just fails over and over. He doesn’t have a memory of the past, but the band does, and they’re stuck in this purgatory cycle with him,” Reilly says.

In chatting up different audience members between selections (“I’m not gay or straight, I’m desperate,” he offers), Reilly hopes to get everybody in the room feeling like they can open up a little bit. The songs, for Reilly, facilitate that softening in a sort of bucket-brigade through time. “‘What’ll I Do?’ could’ve been forgotten by the 1930s, but people loved that song and kept passing it along, and here I am, doing it again,” he says. “I think that’s the way to pay things forward, to pass along what you think is good.”

Now with an album release and several more Mister Romantic shows in his rearview mirror, Reilly is impassioned and reflective as he considers the value of vulnerability in a prickly modern world. His fervent belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature spills over as he shares his efforts to bring a little more love into people’s lives.

You made a point to tell your first audience participant that you weren’t bringing her up there to shame her or embarrass her, which got me thinking about how you’re watching people react to your character in real time. What has that been like for you with these performances?

John C. Reilly: It’s been a really special part of the show. I don’t know what I expected it to be when I started doing this, just kind of improvising my way through, but it’s been amazingly consistent. I say that stuff about “I’m not going to embarrass you or do anything weird” because people just don’t know what the hell the show is about, what the boundaries are. I really want to make people feel like I’m going to take care of them up there. The joke is not going to be on them.

With the audience, I’ve noticed if you really see people and the best in them, or you look for qualities that you find attractive, and you talk about them – it’s amazing the way people let down their guard and open up. It makes the whole audience feel like I’m talking directly to each one of them, even though I only get to four or five people during each show.

Have you had any reactions that have caught you off guard?

Sometimes I ask pretty heavy questions, like, “Have you ever been in love? How long did it last?” People generally want to play along, there’s no one that has ruined the interaction. People always ask me, “Are those people plants?” They’re never plants. The second thing they ask is, “Does anyone ever not cooperate?” I have to say, it’s like, 100% cooperation so far. I think part of it comes from the loving approach and the fact that I say at the beginning what the mission of the night is going to be.

It’s a really encouraging part of the show for me personally, because you really do want to believe that, in their heart of hearts, people are good. When I do this show, that is what I think when I go through the audience. I try to look at every single person directly at some point. The whole point of the show is connection – to the music, the world, to each other – and creating a live unique moment with a group of people. Whatever’s happening outside in the world is one thing, but in here, we’re all going to be connected by the end of the night.

There was a moment where you kind of scolded someone for having their phone out, but you somehow did it in the nicest way possible, where you brought it back to maintaining a connection in the moment.

I try not to even engage with what phones even are. We try to make it clear that you’re not supposed to use your phone during the show. I called that guy out just because I was surprised to see it in his hand. My point was not to say, “You broke the rules!” or get mad at him. There have been other times when people have their phones out. The point of those interactions is always to point out what’s special about this moment without a phone. When I said that, the audience almost started cheering [note: this is true]. Everyone is getting to this place where they’re starting to realize the cost of using a phone, and the separation that it creates between you and a performance or an experience.

How did Largo get to be such a major fixture in your life?

Largo has been a big part of my life since it opened in the early ’90s. It’s been a big part of my development as a singer and as a musician. I had my bluegrass band there for a long time. Mark Flanagan, who owns the place, creates such a special vibe in there, and does not allow cell phones during the shows. The audience ends up being focused in this way that’s different than other places I’ve been.

It’s kind of this temple of quality and entertainment, especially music. When I first started going to Largo, it was Jon Brion and all these different musicians moving through there – a lot of my friends who I play with now, who I played with in the past in other bands. Walk Hard, the songwriters from there – all those guys were all part of the Largo scene in one way or another. It really feels like home when I’m there, and it has its priorities right. It’s not just a place that’s about profit and selling beers, slamming them in and slamming them out. There’s a real soul to the place. I shudder to think what LA would be without Largo.

Is your bluegrass band something you think you’ll return to?

The blues, bluegrass, and this kind of show-tune world are all different aspects of me. I had a blues band before I had a bluegrass band. But I love bluegrass music, for the same reason I love all these American Songbook standards that I’m doing. That’s part of the conversation about the show that I think is really important, that Americana doesn’t just mean white Southern folk music from the 1930s.

People talk about, “What kind of category does [Mister Romantic] fit in?” To me, it’s Americana. A lot of these songs were written by Americans, and they’re not classical music. I think bluegrass definitely falls under the Americana banner, but I think songs in the American Songbook also fall under the Americana banner. Blues music falls under the banner. Why is blues music separated as African-American music? It’s part of America’s history. We should all embrace under the same umbrella.

You’ve talked about using Mister Romantic as a vehicle for getting people to open up a bit more to love and empathy. I think of romance as only one slice of the pie when it comes to loving or forms of love – why go with “romantic” as your channel into exploring empathy?

To me, romance is appreciating a beautiful sunset, or the way a flower looks or smells. Appreciating some weird little detail about a person that makes them unique, that makes you cherish them. It’s not just a Valentine’s Day card. Think about the reason that you got crushes on different people in the past. Sometimes it’s about the physical looks, but oftentimes it’s like, “Man, I just love the way that person does their art.” You crush out on people because of why they’re special. That, to me, is romantic.

On the surface of it, this guy Mister Romantic is trying to fall in love, but he doesn’t even really know what that is. He has so little experience. All he knows is, it’s a deep connection with someone else that will then stay with you forever. I’m not trying to get anyone to be anything. To me, the show is an opportunity to come together. If you’re craving connection, then you should come. I’m not trying to lecture people. I’m just pointing out the inherent truth about human beings, that we do love each other, that the secret to civilization and the reason that human beings are still around on earth is because of love.

I was seeing a lack of empathy – a coarseness to our dialogue, or a viciousness to our debate, and I thought, “Well, that’s distressing. What could I do that might lessen that?” And I decided I’ll do a show about love, and I’ll invite people to come see it, and maybe they’ll feel what I’m feeling. [Mister Romantic] is more about reminding people of what is true about us. On a good day, I think, everyone feels that people are ultimately good when the chips are down.

There’s a line from bell hooks’ All About Love about how “cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart,” and when I re-read that recently, it resonated with how the crowd felt at the end of the show—like this cynical layer that a lot of us have was dissolved for a bit while we were laughing and having a good time together.

Yeah! It’s not just about me and what I’m saying. It’s also the music. The music has an alchemical effect on people that does put air in their balloons. I didn’t know that quote, but I agree with it. I say misanthropes are actually the most romantic people of all. They’re the most sensitive. They’re so sensitive that when they experience disappointment, they retreat into this place of, “Well, if it can’t be perfect, then everything is terrible.” But if you’re really truthful about the way life is, there are all these gray areas. Everyone is not an asshole. That’s a generalization. To be a true misanthrope, you’re generalizing, and not seeing what’s really there.

You have to be open to someone being a good person. I think that’s just the truth of the way things are. I do think if you’re worried and you want things to be better in the world and in your own personal life, you have to be willing to be vulnerable, and willing to reflect a world that you want to see. These things sound so rudimentary, or maybe cliché, but that’s where we’re at. We’re having to fight for empathy, to say, “Human beings have value across the board.” Human rights are at stake right now in the world. So it’s not a cliché. It’s not a thing that’s assumed to be true by everyone. These things have to be regenerated, generation after generation.

What’s something you’ve learned about yourself in the process of bringing Mister Romantic to life?

I’ve learned a lot about the courage it takes to invite people to a place and say, “I’m going to sing for you.” I had to learn what my voice is when I’m not impersonating other people. How do I sing? How do I convey my spirit through my voice? Those are big things, and making this album was a huge step. The personal journey to get yourself to believe that it’s good enough to share –that’s a big struggle for everyone, especially the first time they do it. Mister Romantic was a big step in that direction for me saying, “Whatever, I may not be the most perfect singer, but the reason that I’m singing is a good reason, and I’m going to keep doing it.”

You have to kind of have this blind faith in the mission, because there’s all kinds of slings and arrows that you can generate for yourself. But then you remember the core of it – these experiences that you have during the show, that I have from the show – and that tells you what you should be doing with yourself, what is important. If touching people the way this show touches people isn’t important, then I don’t know what is. It has given meaning to my life at a time when I was really struggling for meaning.


Make plans to meet Mister Romantic at a show near you.

Photo Credit: Bobbi Rich

It’s a Great Time for Roots Music on Broadway

Utter the phrase “Broadway musical” and most folks are likely to assume you’re referring to the jazz-hands-inspiring works of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein; the emotionally manipulative drama of Andrew Lloyd Weber; or the inventive playfulness of Steven Sondheim. But folk and roots music have a long legacy on the great white way — and a bit of a folk boom has been happening in those storied theaters lately.

Granted, Broadway producers have long presented shows that pull in the music of roots-informed artists. Folk-pop singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik delivered a stunning musical score for the groundbreaking Spring Awakening, cementing the careers of Broadway stars Lea Michelle and Jonathan Groff back in 2006. Let’s not forget brief runs of musicals that pulled from the catalogs of Dolly Parton (2009’s stage adaptation of 9 to 5) and Bob Dylan (Girl from the North Country, which debuted in 2020).

Of the shows currently occupying midtown theaters, Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown has run the longest, having just passed its five-year mark. With eight Tony Awards from its 2019 debut, the musical pairs the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with that of Hades and Persephone. Though its original cast has scattered to other projects, beloved folksinger Ani DiFranco spent a bit of her winter and spring this year offering a stunning run as Persephone.

Ani DiFranco and Anaïs Mitchell outside the Walter Kerr Theater in New York City. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

Fans may know DiFranco trained for many years as a dancer, even as she was building her singer-songwriter street cred. She proves to be a triple threat in the role, embodying the storied arbiter of summertime with a deeply rooted, empathic swagger. And though her June 30 departure feels like the end of an era for the musical, her latest album Unprecedented Sh!t (released May 17 on Righteous Babe Records) charts some new sonic territory via her political POVs.

Further, it’s hard to mourn DiFranco moving on when it was recently announced that British country favorite Yola will replace her in the role of Persephone, beginning July 2.

Hadestown was briefly joined last year by fellow roots musical Shucked, which came and went too soon. Awash in silly corn puns and Tampa-centric storyline, its earworm score was penned by Nashville mainstays — and Grammy darlings — Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally.

Last month, Illinoise opened at the St. James Theater on 44th St. Pulling tracks from Sufjan Stevens’s sprawling, ambitious 2006 album of the same name, the show reorders the songs to depict a group of friends sharing stories around a campfire. There is no dialogue. Instead, a 12-piece band and a trio of vocalists in magical butterfly wings perform the music in the background.

Upstage, Illinoise tells its stories through exquisite choreography that runs the gambit from lyrical contemporary to hip-hop, some sweet Broadway jazz, and even one number (“Jacksonville”) with a lightning-fast tapper in pinstripes. Dancers touch on love and loss, fear and transcendence.

“Zombies” becomes a scene about the immigrant experience, as dancer Jeanette Delgado (“Jo”) tries to outrun the ghosts of America’s founders, whose complex legacies still haunt the present day. “The Man of Metropolis” becomes a comical superhero-themed character romp. And former Billy Elliot star Ben Cook (“Carl”) delivers a heartbreaking and inspired series in Act II to track an emotionally complex love triangle.

By show’s end, there is a pervasive sense of the opportunity art grants us to transcend our selves and build a better world together. It’s no wonder the show was nominated for four Tony Awards, including Best Musical. If it wins, it will be the first time a dance musical has won the prestigious award.

The Outsiders, meanwhile, is running now just one block away, at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. It sets to music the novel by S.E. Hinton, which was immortalized in a 1980s film by Francis Ford Coppola. Produced in part by Angelina Jolie, with a book by New York theater fixture Adam Rapp (Wolf in the River, The Sound Outside) and music by Americana mainstays Jamestown Revival, this musical version unfortunately doesn’t measure up to the other two roots musicals in the neighborhood.

Granted, perhaps it doesn’t have to. The Broadway League and American Theater Wing don’t seem to be anything less than impressed, having nominated the musical for a whopping 12 Tonys this year. It may not translate seamlessly to the Broadway stage, but The Outsiders is a story that has been beloved by numerous generations. It was a treat to witness members of Generation Alpha giddy with excitement to take in the narrative arc of Ponyboy and the other Curtis brothers — a story that feels to this writer as though it’s rooted in Gen X sensibilities, despite being set in the 1960s.

Choreography by Rick and Jeff Kuperman was athletic and stunning — plenty of leaps and jumps and long, denim-clad legs spinning in the air like human helicopters. The Kuperman brothers’ martial arts background comes through even beyond the inventive dance-fight scenes. There is water on the stage, somehow, and it splashes up from time to time, for some reason. It doesn’t matter why. The effect is properly dramatic.

Brent Comer, who plays “Darryl,” steals the show with his powerful Zac Brown-reminiscent twang. He has some of the most compelling solos, embodying the exhaustion of a stay-at-home-mom as he folds clothes and laments his lot in life, “somewhere between brother and father” since their parents died. Jason Schmidt as “Sodapop” matched his rootsy musicality with the second-act heart grabber, “Throw in the Towel.”

But it is Joshua Boone’s “Dallas” who is perhaps the show’s greatest revelation, with his Bill Withers-esque vocals on solos like “Little Brother.” Brody Grant as Ponyboy seemed a bit lacking during the matinee performance this writer recently caught, but it could have been an off moment. Eight shows a week requires almost superhuman amounts of energy reserve.

Or perhaps it was a side effect of Grant being in his 20s while his character is supposed to be 14. Indeed, despite the electricity of The Outsiders’ score and choreography, the script doesn’t feel as authentic as its emotional realities demand. Hinton’s book offered readers a revolutionary view of teen struggles, written by a teenager. Perhaps the Broadway show should have brought in some teenagers to consult.

Regardless, both Grant and Boone were nominated for Tonys (as was Sky Lakota-Lynch, who delivers a haunting performance as Johnny). For folks just interested in what Jamestown Revival did for the show’s score, an Original Broadway Cast Recording is available now.

All told, there is no indication Broadway is going to break its love affair with roots music anytime soon. The Avett Brothers are set to make their Broadway debut with shipwreck-themed musical Swept Away this fall. The show has previewed in California and Washington, D.C., and has received critical praise already. Swept Away’s score is drawn from the Avetts’ 2004 album, Mignonette, plus four other songs from their canon — a treat for the band’s incredibly loyal fanbase and Broadway subscribers alike.

Further on the horizon is an adaptation of the classic labor movement-inspired film Norma Rae, with music by Rosanne Cash. In an email, her manager indicated a possible 2025 opening. One can only hope. And, just last week, Dolly Parton announced an upcoming original musicalHello, I’m Dolly, set to arrive on Broadway in 2026.


The 77th Tony Awards will be held on Sunday, June 16, 2024 and will air on CBS. Find out how to watch here.

Playbill images courtesy of Playbill.com

Wait For Me: Anaïs Mitchell and Hadestown Finally Make It to Broadway

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