Originating as Anaïs Mitchell's 2010 folk concept album retelling the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, Hadestown won 8 Tony Awards in 2019, including Best Musical and Best Original Score.
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Anaïs Mitchell built this over more than a decade, and the seams are load-bearing rather than concealed. It began as a community theatre piece performed in Vermont towns in 2006, became a studio concept album in 2010, and only turned into a stage work after Mitchell met the director Rachel Chavkin in 2012. From there it went to New York Theatre Workshop in 2016, then to the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton and the National Theatre in London before reaching Broadway.
The score is folk writing crossed with New Orleans jazz, and it is played by a small band that sits on stage in view throughout. A trombone carries much of the argument. Hades sings in a bass register so low it functions as scenery, and the workers' chorus is written in the rhythm of a work song rather than a production number. Rachel Hauck's set puts the whole thing on turntables, so that the descent to the underworld is achieved by walking in place while the world revolves — a piece of staging that does more with less than almost anything else on Broadway in its era.
It opened at the Walter Kerr Theatre in April 2019 and won eight Tony Awards, among them Best Musical, Best Original Score and Best Direction of a Musical for Chavkin, with André De Shields taking featured actor as the narrator Hermes. Rachel Hauck's set, Bradley King's lighting and the sound design all won as well.
One song regularly gets read as topical. 'Why We Build the Wall' was written in 2006, a decade before the political campaign audiences now hear in it, and Mitchell has said as much. The larger structural fact is that the show gives away the ending in its first number and proceeds anyway: Hermes announces that this is a sad song, that it ends badly, and that we sing it regardless. Everything after that is an argument about why people keep trying.
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Hadestown is a musical with music, lyrics, and book by Anaïs Mitchell. It blends versions of two ancient Greek myths, Orpheus and Eurydice and Hades and Persephone, to explore enduring and contemporary themes such as poverty.
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