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Jul. 27th, 2019 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI went down to New York this week to see the musical Hadestown with newredshoes (who had seen it years ago, the NYTW version, and has now written up a great comparison post.) I have been hearing people rave about this show for the last half decade; I also made a very deliberate choice not to listen to the soundtrack beforehand, so here is what I had osmosed about the show before going in:
- the plot involves Orpheus and Eurydice
- Amber Grey is Persephone is the most important and beautiful thing on the stage
- Patrick Page is Hades is also the Green Goblin from Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark and thus part of an important cultural moment in my life
- (and Orpheus is Reeve Carney who was Spiderman and thus ditto)
- 1930s? dustbowl??
And all of these things did indeed turn out to be true! (Though apparently the show is much less dustbowl-y than it used to be.)
I'd heard the show was good; I expected to like it. I didn't at all expect to get as swept up in it as I did. As the narrator Hermes points out from the very beginning, we all know the story, of Orpheus and Eurydice, and how it ends.
The first act -- Orpheus and Eurydice meet on a railroad line, in a world where the seasons have been throw out of joint by the rift between a hard, industrial Hades and a jaded, hedonistic Persephone -- is beautiful, gorgeously staged and performed, and I enjoyed it a lot. It was, more or less, what I expected from the show.
In the second act, Orpheus comes to find Eurydice in Hadestown, where the working dead labor away on Hades' projects, losing their names and faces, heads down, indistinguishable. When Orpheus sings the memory of love back into Hades and Persephone's marriage, that provides the opening for the possibility of Eurydice's rescue, but also for something bigger. If Orpheus can walk the long hard back road out of Hadestown, Eurydice can do it. If Eurydice can do it, the rest of the chorus can follow, too. Success takes almost impossible amounts of trust, and the odds against it are incredibly high, and structural inequity and the fears of the powerful and internal doubt are all working against you, but it can be done -
- and this time, it won't be. We know it won't be. But all the same the show somehow manages to do exactly what Hermes tells you it's going to do: you watch it play out and hope against hope that somehow, this time, the ending will be different.
At the end, the show rewinds, and starts over: it's Dark Tower, or Utena, or Russian Doll. If you're going to break yourself out of the cycle, you have to do it alone, and you have to do it together, and both of those things are true. They can't quite do it this time. But maybe, next time, they will.
...so anyway that's what I got from the show! Time to go buy the soundtrack and find every gif of Amber Grey dancing, because that woman's stage presence is absolutely unbelievable.
newredshoes (who had seen it years ago, the NYTW version, and has now written up a great comparison post.) I have been hearing people rave about this show for the last half decade; I also made a very deliberate choice not to listen to the soundtrack beforehand, so here is what I had osmosed about the show before going in:- the plot involves Orpheus and Eurydice
- Amber Grey is Persephone is the most important and beautiful thing on the stage
- Patrick Page is Hades is also the Green Goblin from Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark and thus part of an important cultural moment in my life
- (and Orpheus is Reeve Carney who was Spiderman and thus ditto)
- 1930s? dustbowl??
And all of these things did indeed turn out to be true! (Though apparently the show is much less dustbowl-y than it used to be.)
I'd heard the show was good; I expected to like it. I didn't at all expect to get as swept up in it as I did. As the narrator Hermes points out from the very beginning, we all know the story, of Orpheus and Eurydice, and how it ends.
The first act -- Orpheus and Eurydice meet on a railroad line, in a world where the seasons have been throw out of joint by the rift between a hard, industrial Hades and a jaded, hedonistic Persephone -- is beautiful, gorgeously staged and performed, and I enjoyed it a lot. It was, more or less, what I expected from the show.
In the second act, Orpheus comes to find Eurydice in Hadestown, where the working dead labor away on Hades' projects, losing their names and faces, heads down, indistinguishable. When Orpheus sings the memory of love back into Hades and Persephone's marriage, that provides the opening for the possibility of Eurydice's rescue, but also for something bigger. If Orpheus can walk the long hard back road out of Hadestown, Eurydice can do it. If Eurydice can do it, the rest of the chorus can follow, too. Success takes almost impossible amounts of trust, and the odds against it are incredibly high, and structural inequity and the fears of the powerful and internal doubt are all working against you, but it can be done -
- and this time, it won't be. We know it won't be. But all the same the show somehow manages to do exactly what Hermes tells you it's going to do: you watch it play out and hope against hope that somehow, this time, the ending will be different.
At the end, the show rewinds, and starts over: it's Dark Tower, or Utena, or Russian Doll. If you're going to break yourself out of the cycle, you have to do it alone, and you have to do it together, and both of those things are true. They can't quite do it this time. But maybe, next time, they will.
...so anyway that's what I got from the show! Time to go buy the soundtrack and find every gif of Amber Grey dancing, because that woman's stage presence is absolutely unbelievable.
