I
may have been wrong about Hadestown in my
original assessment (which was part of a longer think piece, published
“off-site”); but I may have been right, too, then. I cited it as an example of the type of musical that didn’t
“know” the difference between what’s important to sing about—what we in the
game call the events of the story—and
what isn’t. And thus, feeling an obligation to sing about everything. Based on Anaïs Mitchell’s
concept album re-telling the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in jazz terms,
“it takes,” I said then, “two acts plus an
intermission to accomplish what could have easily been done in less than 90
break-free minutes, not only sacrificing nothing in effectiveness but gaining a
great deal.”
Well,
the show isn’t any shorter, and I don’t remember my first viewing clearly
enough to say if there has been any rewriting or sharpening in the two years
since its initial staging at the New York Theatre Workshop; but I can say that
via the same director, Rachel Chavkin, it has undergone a serious transformation.
Whereas the original staging was environmental (in the round and throughout the
audience), which encouraged a sprawl of focus, it has been totally reconceived,
re-designed and re-costumed for a proscenium stage; certain key roles have been
re-cast and re-imagined; and even the returning players are each back with a
new look. And what all this, almost crowded onto the tighter confines of the
single, nightclub-surreal set at the Walter
Kerr Theatre, adds to the experience is…permission to concentrate. What
previously seemed to me tediously schematic is now tautly ritualistic.
The
cast is terrific and committed. Orpheus and Euridice,
once a hunk and a beauty, are now a callow kid (Reeve Carney) and a short, unprepossessing teenage girl (Eva Nobelezada).
Where narrator Hermes was once a bowler-hatted hipster, he’s now sly and sinewy
(Andre de Shields). Persephone and
Hades remain personified by Amber Gray and
Patrick Page; but she’s in bright
pastel green rather than earth tones; and he has the stance, swagger and
wardrobe of a Hollywood mogul, intense gaze at first hidden behind shades, and
his former black hair now bleached opposite-of-evil white.
Because
of its through-composed ritualism, I don’t think of Hadestown as a musical per se, but
rather as a staged jazz oratorio. Now, this is the kind of distinction I tend
to split hairs over…because while I believe there are all kinds of musical
theatre structures and approaches, I also think there are, in extremis, stylistic and compositional lines of demarcation; and
Ms. Mitchell seems to me firmly on the other side of the divide…but if you
attend knowing that Hadestown is in its own genre—an indirect
descendant of 1983’s The Gospel at Colonus (see it here on YouTube)—and, that its material
has been very effectively wrangled by a director who understands its strengths,
and seems to have conquered its weaknesses, you can give over and give over and
get into the groove; for the new approach also
allows for what I’ll call “crossover tolerance.”
Makes
for a nice surprise.
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