Hadestown at the Walter Kerr

Or: Great Wheel

Well over ten years ago, I was introduced to a folk opera, composed by the plaintively voiced, lyrically resplendent musician Anais Mitchell. The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, transplanted to somewhere in America at sometime when music gleamed and times were tough, took a firm and thriving root in Mitchell’s ballads and in my own imagination. I could always count upon it, to lift my spirits or match and comfort me in loneliness. Now, finally, I had the chance to sit, with trepidation, to see the folk opera turned to a fully fledged broadway musical, and wonder what had become of my darling under the bright lights.

I was not in the least disappointed. The song, re-sung again by Hermes (Trent Saunders, suave and stylish), takes us to an in-between space, a worn club right out of Tennessee Williams, all deep cool colors, snaking iron, and ware (all beautifully designed by Rachel Huack, who also must have had a hand in the ingenious, three wheeled turntable that feature so well).

This space where we are serenaded by gods and spun by an onstage orchestra (special mention to the trombonist Brian Drye, who often levitates from his seat to join the choreography) is an place between the dust of the workaday world and Hadestown, an afterlife factory, of hungers sated and endless labor to keep the hot lights burning. It’s also the meeting place between Hades (Patrick Page), lord of his eponymous Underworld, and Persephone (Lana Gordon) mistress of good times and growing things, whose seasonally affecting marriage has lately come under strain, throwing both worlds out of wack.

Above this turning point, Orpheus (Jordan Dobson), a sweethearted musician in Hermes’s employ, falls in love with Eurydice (Jessie Shelton) , a rootless girl blown ever onward by the Fates (Kay Trinidad, Jewelle Blackman, and Tael “Yaya” Reich, a trio of viola voiced crooners and cacklers who supply fiddle, concertina and hand bells as a counterpoint to the warm tones of the band).

Shelton’s Eurydice falls in love with the simple Orpheus for his “song” an ancient tune from the heart of the world he’s working to right all wrongs and bring the spring again. She matches her voice, bright and sharp with country shine to his high angelic voice (one of the best musical tricks is when Dobson sings in harmony with the chorus of workers as thought they are harmonizing extensions of his song, letting his voice flow through them). Their mix, her hardedge bristle, his tender bursting, strikes off showers of sparks (The twining of their hands, lying side by side on stage after a simple, balletic courtship.) But hard times and self doubt and an empty belly convince her to sink into Hadestown and sign her life away to join the working dead. Orpheus is forced to put his life, and song, to the test, traveling to the draconian world (in “Wait for Me,” a masterwork of song and stagecraft) to win back his wife.

All the beautiful elements of Mitchell’s opera are all there (The heartbreak of “Flowers” which Shelton sobs beautifully, the circulating horror of “Why Do We Build the Wall,”) but the unfolding of it as musical fills in the opera’s blank spaces and lends heft to the characters. The mythology of the world, while it’s enriching to know your Hamilton or Bullfinch, is fairly simple. The rich are rapacious or oblivious and have become unmoored from the world around them, casting life and weather into upheaval and only a reminder of their humanity can set things right. It’s a magic, that big and that simple, reflected in the staging; in one memorable instance of Hades striding on the rotating wheel mid castigation, going nowhere but making the whole world spin around him, in another, the simple stage magic of a red carnation blooming in a characters hand, elucidating a chorus of gasps through the theater.

The plague has left its mark here. Gordon, with her salty voice that stretches and drapes, and her timeless winsomeness (a shoulder shake like an unfurling flower, a sudden duck and stomp of dance steps as though she is being pulled to the underworld) plays into Persephone’s patroness of joy and celebration (warm and welcome at first, becoming more tragic as the show goes on), by stirring up the band and the house. She and Dayne, bopping around the stage in time to his trombone, give tacit permission to sway and stamp and dance in the aisles, but the wave of feeling breaks on the rocky shore of pandemic fears, and masked care, and we are only misted, rather than swept away.

But if times are hard we can at least recognize the timelessness of it, as well as the immortal story of burning love and leaden doubt. The play owes much to the story of union struggles from the 30’s, small man vs the slick toned god (a part Page plays to perfection, with a voice that rasps and rattles and pours smooth and crude as oil, best experienced in “Chant” or “Papers”). The devouring fires of greed, the driving force of Hadestown, scorches the soul of everything it touches, boss and worker both, and the poverty it perpetuates and reputes, can be seen in many forms Predation, hunger, climate change, and racism (when Dobson, a young Black man, is cornered by Hades, trapped on the wheel while the king of the mine strides against its spin, the contemptuous “boy” that scrapes from the god’s lips sent a shiver through the whole audience.)

Hadestown is a tragedy, no doubt, but in the lead up to its crash you can’t help but think that maybe this time it come out a triumph. And it may yet. As Hermes sings it one day we may be able to sing the song aright, and so the last two moments of the show sow hope and peace rather than despair. It’s a particular magic of the show of fantastic riches, beautiful sweeps of music, incandescently shining lyrics, stagecraft, and the turn of an old story into something new. It has all the loveliness I heard more then ten years ago and brings forward so much more.