Hadestown and Life in 2021
Hadestown opens with almost all of the characters already onstage. The crowd immediately went crazy. And I immediately thought, ‘Oh no. It’s one of those shows.”
Broadway finally reopened in September after being shut down for a brutal eighteen months. And last month I went to see Hadestown, which won the 2019 Tony for Best Musical, Best Score, Best Featured Actor, and a bunch of other things. I knew nothing about the show other than it was a rock and blues-inspired musical retelling of the tragic story of Orpheus and Eurydice. I thought it might have some great songs. What I didn’t expect is that it would be such a potent and encouraging parable for our own lives in this crises-laden world of today.
If you’ve spent much time going to musicals, whether in New York or elsewhere, you know “those shows” — the ones teenagers have inexplicably seen a hundred times (Who is paying their bills, and how do I get on that tab?), and so react to it in a way that makes no sense relative to what is actually happening on stage. They give the show away, effectively telling me that the aged black man who walks slowly across the stage is clearly important before the actor even has had a chance to show me for himself. If you’re not already “in the know,” “these shows” (or better, these fans) can make you feel as if you don’t belong there or you’re not “in” on some joke.
But it turns out Hadestown is very much not “that kind of show.” You will find no Disney stories of female empowerment here, no bravura dudes strutting around the stage insisting over and over that they’re not going to miss their shot.
And in the words of the Broadway producer character in Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along: “There’s not a tune you can hum. There’s not a tune that goes ‘bum-bum-bum-de-dum.’” There is beautiful music here, some gorgeous, memorable love songs that you’ll want to hear again, but none of us will likely have to survive a karaoke hellscape of teenagers, twenty-somethings (or for that matter fifty-somethings) shrieking songs from this show.
No, the response at the beginning of Hadestown comes from its ending, which I am going to spoil now, insofar as the ending of a Greek myth that is roughly 2,500 years old can be spoiled. Having worked so hard and risked so much to win his beloved Eurydice back from Hades, King of the Underworld, the poet-singer Orpheus manages to botch the landing, losing her again due to his own insecurities just before they are able to escape. (As fans of Greek mythology will understand, even in that description I have left some things ambiguous. If you don’t know the myth, you’re welcome!)
It’s a painful ending, the more so within a musical which is so clearly structured to see the two of them end up together. One of the great things about the storytelling of Hadestown in fact is that we get no hint that Orpheus might fail at any point before the final number. Throughout the show, Orpheus demonstrates neither pride nor anxiety, but simply hope. It’s Eurydice who has been tempted repeatedly by despair.
And so when Orpheus fails, it feels very shocking — and also unexpectedly real. So often in real life, disaster and personal failure seem to come without warning, on impulse, or are only comprehensible in retrospect. I have been in that place and I bet you have, too.
But the show isn’t over quite yet. That elderly man from the beginning, who plays Hermes, Messenger to the Gods, steps forward once again. By this time you know why they applauded for him at the beginning: he is amazing. But now the theater is completely silent.
Beset by his own grief over what has happened, Hermes reminds us that this is an ancient tale, and it always ends this way. And yet, he points out, we keep telling it.
“Why do we do that?,” he asks. Because we hope that this time it will turn out differently. Our willingness to hear the story again, for the performers to sing the song of Orpheus and Eurydice again, is all an expression of our deep belief that some other ending is possible, that a sad story doesn’t have to end that way. We can imagine something different happening and what can be imagined can actually be.
(In a sense, the musical has already shown us that this is possible with the story of Hades and his estranged wife Persephone, who rediscover their love through Orpheus’s song. When they reunited, it hit me so hard. It is so terribly difficult to forgive someone who has abandoned or betrayed you when you’ve allowed yourself to be vulnerable with them. It is so hard to start again. I felt as though I was watching a miracle happen.)
It all sounds very meta and mythological, I know. But sitting there I couldn’t help but think this is the story of us right now — still trapped in a global pandemic, the climate crisis escalating exponentially, and so many other crises piled on as well. Much of the media narrative seems that it could be summarized as “We’re doomed.” Welcome to Hadestown, indeed.
But, in fact, we’re still here. We’re still able to make new choices and still capable of imagining another way forward. And what can be imagined can be some day.
Fans applaud at the beginning of Hadestown not because they’re groupies whose parents have way too much money (well … not only that), but because the show invites us to see within the very act of telling a tragic story the possibility of something different, better, new.
And if I’m being honest, some part of me really does believe that I will go to see Hadestown again some day, maybe on a Sunday afternoon next spring after these fans have moved on to High School Musical, The TV Show: The Musical, Based on a True Story about a High School Musical TV Show, and then I will get to the end and watch as Orpheus just keeps walking, and Eurydice follows him dancing out of hell once and for all.
And maybe we’ll be dancing behind them, too.
