A hair under a month ago, we went down to see a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, which was primarily of interest to The Pip, who’s a big baseball player. As a complement to that, we made a second run down to New York City this past weekend, to take in a Broadway show, because SteelyKid is nuts for musicals. Specifically, we got tickets to see Hadestown, which won a bunch of awards a few years ago.
SteelyKid has been obsessively listening to the soundtrack for a while now, and was absolutely over the moon to see it in person. I spent the second half of the show in the seat right next to SteelyKid, who was vibrating at about 120Hz, and clapping wildly at every pause. The Pip was also pretty into the whole show, though he knew nothing about it coming in. The trip was a smashing success in that regard.
Before commenting on the show itself I should note two caveats: first, that I am not really a musicals person as a general matter, and second that live theater is often kind of rough for me. I’m acutely aware that at my size I block the view of the people behind me, and as is often the case, the seats in the Walter Kerr Theater were narrow enough that there was exactly one way I could fit my knees into the row (we didn’t have an aisle seat). That meant I couldn’t shift position and as a result my lower back got pretty tight. Happily, when I switched seats at the intermission, the single position I could sit in in the new seat was just different enough that the process somewhat reset, and at least didn’t get drastically worse. (When we saw a touring production of Hamilton, I could barely walk out of the theater…) Anyway, the physical discomfort likely colors my impression of the show, so salt to taste.
The show is a retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, moved to an ambiguously modern-ish time frame— the costumes and a lot of the music feel kind of Depression-era, but it’s never specified. Hades is both the lord of the underworld and some sort of industrialist forcing the dead to work on building a wall around his domain, so there’s a vaguely socialist labor-vs-management slant to a bunch of the songs. There are also a bunch of references to climate change connected to Persephone’s trips back and forth to Hadestown. So, you know, it’s sorta-kinda topical.
The production is very much in the modern Broadway mold, with a smallish cast and a lot of fairly abstract dancing about to symbolize actions that would otherwise require something more elaborate. The band is on the stage, and occasionally joined in (though maybe it was only the trombone player who came down to the front of the stage…); they’re introduced in rock-concert fashion in one of the songs.
The show worked very well as spectacle. T. Oliver Reid was fantastic as Hermes, providing a kind of on-stage narration; I liked his voice better than the soundtrack recording (it’s a little deeper and richer than whoever that was). Patrick Page as Hades was also really impressive; his singing voice is deep enough to cause some speculation among our party that they were doing some sort of digital modification (all of the cast were wearing headset mics; I don’t think that was what was going on, though). The dancing was high-energy and well staged, and the trombone player was terrific.
The fundamental problem the show has is just that it’s a retelling of the Orpheus story, which turns on him being this spectacularly great singer who melts the heart of Hades with his song and… that just didn’t work for me. The verses of the song are direct narrative in a way that felt a little ham-handed. And the key bit of the chorus is just a bunch of “La la la”s, which feels like a cheat (the conceit is that it’s the same tune as the song Hades wooed Persephone to, and that’s why it works).
But, honestly, the real problem is the singing. The book needs Orpheus to be a total naif, and this is accomplished by having Reeve Carney sing in a way that played to me like someone doing a TikTok spoof of a reedy folk singer. The shadow of his headset mic also made him look to me like he was making a really weird face a lot of the time. He was a lot better in songs together with Eva Noblezada’s Eurydice (she’s great), but the “Epic” song really fell pretty flat for me, and unfortunately that’s the core of the piece.
But, as I said, it works very well as spectacle, and Reid and Page are outstanding. And, really, the critical part of the weekend was for SteelyKid to experience Broadway. That part couldn’t’ve gone better, so while I wasn’t as blown away, in the end that really doesn’t matter.
Next up on the cultural experience program, I’ll be taking SteelyKid and a couple of friends to see the My Chemical Romance show in Albany tonight. If you’d like to hear about that, or other half-baked cultural criticism, here’s a button:
And if you’d like to argue with my characterization of the show, or suggest other musicals that we ought to check out the next time we make a run down the Thruway, the comments will be open: