Music Monday: A Great, If Flawed, Musical

This past Wednesday my wife and eldest son went into Boston to the Wang theater to catch a performance of Hadestown. I’m told it was excellent. While I haven’t had the in-theater, there is a bootleg performance of the entire show available that I highly recommend.

Hadestown is a retelling of the ancient Greek myth of the tragic love of Orpheus and Eurydice set during the Great Depression. The music is inspired by Jazz, Blues and Folk music.

In this version, Hades has been keeping Persephone for longer than his allotted six months and doing so has robbed the world of spring and autumn and shortened the summers, thus leading to widespread hunger and poverty.

Orpheus is a young man writing a song that, when sung, will right the world. He and Euydice meet, fall in love and marry. While desperate for food and fuel, Eurydice is tempted by Hades and the Fates to shelter in Hades’s subterranean factory, the titular Hadestown.

Orpheus, through Hermes’s intervention, travels to Hades town where he eventually sings his song and convinces Hades to allow he and Eurydice to return to the overworld. Hades reluctantly agrees on the condition that Orpheus walk in front and Eurydice behind and that Orpheus must not look back to ensure she follows until they both have reached their destination.

Orpheus reaches the overworld but, in doubt, turns back to see Eurydice before she has, thus condemning her to return, forever, to Hadestown.

This is a great show. The tunes are memorable and thrilling. “Wait for Me,” in particular, is a show-stopper – the cast swing hanging lights to lend a greater sense of urgency and motion to the scene – that, with some slight changes to the lyrics for context, easily be a pop hit.

Setting the tale during the Depression was a masterstroke.

So, too, was the casting and the idea to place the orchestra pit on stage, with the unspoken pun on the word pit and a synonym for Hell.

Writer Anaïs Mitchell’s pugnaciousness and tenacity to take this show from a community theater in Vermont through to successful runs in the West End and Broadway and ultimately raking in eight Tony awards – including for Best Musical, Best Book and Best Original Score – is inspiring.

There are some flaws in the broad strokes and writing, however. There is an unsubtle anti-capitalist theme to the show – which is fine, the writer and director are free to take that stance – but the show never engages intellectually with the issue, rather pulling cliched strawmen out to be paraded about. No one not already convinced that capitalism is bad is going to be swayed to that position by this show.

My problem is not so much that I disagree, but that it appears to me that writer Mitchell – who deserves much more praise than criticism, I freely admit – was so focused on the political aspects of the story that she made some questionable storytelling decisions.

The first, and lesser flaw, is the song – which, for the record, I adore –”Why We Build the Wall.” One can argue in good faith over the merits or demerits of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration, but the notion of putting people to work, which Hades wryly notes “is never done”, to, supposedly, stave off poverty by a paternalistic, monied authority is not an example of capitalism. I’ll you have it as an example of money equating power, but that relationship is not unique to capitalist societies.

My bigger issue is having Hadestown be a factory. I suspect that Mitchell so wanted Industry to be the bad guy that she forced the metaphor and in doing so completely ignored a much richer one.

Simply put: Why is Hadestown not a factory but an Appalachian mining town?

Why is “Why We Build the Wall” not, instead, about hacking at a subterranean coal face? See, the plight of miners would still allow for the theme Mitchell was aiming at. Eurydice signing her contract to work for Hades already alludes to sexual coercion. Why not make it a reference to the wives who sacrificed their bodies and their dignity so that their husbands could keep their jobs? Why not make the work not assembly, but a literal death sentence to the workers?

When my son first played me some of his favorite songs from the show, I was so convinced that it was about a mine that my two word reaction when Hades first mentioned his factory was: The hell?

These flaws can be easily ignored, however. The music is great, the acting in versions that I’ve seen has been great, and tells a timeless tale of tragic love.

Highly recommended.