Hadestown The Musical (pro-shot movie release)

What sheer joy! The people who put together the pro-shot of Hadestown got pretty much everything right. They captured the full experience of Hadestown, of course with the usual video vs live differences. 

Video Pros

• It exists!
• Fabulous close-ups
• Vibrant sense of immediacy

Video Cons

• You're not there
• You don't get to choose what to look at
  
• Many videos use thousands of edits and don't allow the audience to settle in to watch. Ultimately, this approach disrespects the show and the performers, because it interrupts everything. The audience doesn't want arty editing. We want clarity.

Hadestown maximizes the pros and minimizes the cons. The editing is smart and not frenetic. Perhaps because director Brett Sullivan worked with the original theatre director Rachel Chavkin, the pro-shot is always in the service of the show. Hadestown is not only respected--it is loved. This is the best performance capture I've ever seen. (And it wasn't too loud!)

I'm thrilled that this pro-shot includes five original performers from the American premiere, but I'm sad that it was shot in London. Whatever problems with rights and unions and other obstacles to recording shows on Broadway, everyone involved has to get over it! On BroadwayHD, there are a ton of American musicals, but mostly with English casts, video-ed on the West End. It's as though they have more respect for our work than we do. It's fabulous that the Library of the Performing Arts has a huge library of recorded shows, but not everyone lives in New York.

At the showing I attended, the audience was fabulous. Engaged, responsive, happy to be there. No cell phones, no noise except the chomping of popcorn. One person applauded after every number, and we all applauded at the end.

Hadestown has been extended. Do see it if you can. And stay through the credits. There's some fun stuff at the end.

Wendy Caster

Hadestown

It's a sad song

It's a sad tale, it's a tragedy

It's a sad song

But we sing it anyway

'Cause here's the thing: 

To know how it ends 

And still begin to sing it again

As if it might turn out this time

I learned that from a friend of mine

See, Orpheus was a poor boy

But he had a gift to give: 

He could make you see how the world could be

In spite of the way that it is

Helen Maybanks

One of the many miracles of Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell and Rachel Chavkin's strange, stunning folk opera at the Kerr, is the richly bittersweet way it manages to simultaneously lament and celebrate the endless repetitions that make up human lives. In so many ways, most all of them beautiful in execution, this haunting show teases out the endless redundancies and rituals that lead us from birth to death, pointing out along that way that cycles can be a drag, but also the source of joy and celebration. Life might seem futile in its repetitions, Hadestown implies, but so long as there's the potential for beauty, love and ritual, it isn't a waste.

Hadestown

Have you ever not completely connected with a show when you first sat through it, only to fall head over heels in love with it in retrospect? It's happened to me on only a few occasions that I can recall. I was amused and entertained by Passing Strange, for example, but not so passionately that I was even remotely prepared to wake up the following morning with the almost physical urge to listen to the cast recording over and over again, thereby cementing my embrace of a show I'd been unsure about in the first place.

I'm back there with Hadestown, a gorgeous, strange theatrical rendering of the 2010 concept album of the same name by Anais Mitchell. The production, running through the end of the month at New York Theatre Workshop, boasts a terrific cast, whose voices are haunting and appropriately weird. The visual aspects of the production are gorgeously rendered, thanks in part to Rachel Chavkin, an innovative director whose current hot status is well-deserved. The backing band is jumping, the music is catchy, and the set and lighting deceptively simple. The numbers alternate between deeply affecting ("Flowers"), amusingly jaunty ("Our Lady of the Underground"), and bone-chillingly prescient ("Why We Built the Wall", which is one of the catchiest songs on the album, and also the ickiest given the current political climate). Still, while I found myself loving the show's many parts, the finished product initially left me cold, since it doesn't try too hard to fill in all the narrative gaps left by the original album.

Joan Marcus