Hadestown North American Tour photo by Kevin Berne
Broadway at the Hobby Center hosted the final show of the 2021-2022 season this week with the long-awaited Tony Award-winning production of Hadestown. Postponed since January 2022 due to Covid, the show was definitely worth the wait and I would argue the rest of the audience would agree with me. From the first moment the cast entered the stage the audience’s energy was palpable. Hermes’ first entrance was met with over a minute of applause, and many other jokes and show-stopping scenes throughout the show had similar reactions from the house. Anais Mitchell’s musical follows the mythological love story of Orpheus and Eurydice in a storytelling format narrated by Hades, the messenger of the Gods. The touring production, introducing many new leading cast members on opening night in Houston, was incredibly talented and kept the audience on the edges of their seats throughout the roller-coaster of a story. Mitchell’s musical is entirely “sung-through” with original tracks ranging from chants to ballads to epics. The characters subtly addressed topics such as love, heartbreak, trust, and power, while inviting the audience multiple times to think to themselves about how they would’ve acted if they were in their shoes.
The Hadestown cast’s immense talent is visible throughout this production, especially with their ability to gracefully change between comedic scenes to heartfelt ballads to gravely chants. Chibueze Ihuoma, a 2021 graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, plays the lovestruck Orpheus with a passion hard to find even in veteran actors. His songs had a beautiful range, showcasing both his chest voice and head voice with many falsetto melodies. Nathan Lee Graham as Hermes, the unbeatable narrator, carried the audience through the story on his winged feet. Matthew Patrick Quinn’s low vocal range as Hades reverberated through the vast Sarofim Hall during his solos in “Hey, Little Songbird” and “Why We Build This Wall”. As Hermes aptly titles them “the hardest working chorus”, the workers chorus were as talented as any of the actors, playing both free-spirited restaurant patrons “up above” and mine workers “down below”.
The original Broadway production of Hadestown won 8 out of their 14 Tony Award nominations in 2019, with many of the awards going to the creative team. The lighting and scenic designs worked in tandem and made the most of a mostly-static set. The show starts in a restaurant setting, with the band members on risers on the side, and the tables and chairs are removed as the story begins. The entirety of the plot takes place in this same setting and features a variety of props and lighting elements to create the different locations throughout the show, wrapping up back in the same restaurant setting as Hermes finishes telling the audience the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. One scene, “Wait For Me”, features Orpheus finding his way to Hadestown through an untraveled path, where the workers chorus dressed as miners light the stage with headlamps and swinging chandeliers. As Orpheus approaches Hadestown, the set splits in pieces and draws apart, backlit by work lights, to reveal pipes in the walls and represent the underground they have entered. This scene in its entirety, from the melody and choreography to the scenic and lighting elements, instantly became my favorite scene in all of Broadway.
If you have an opportunity to see Hadestown while it is in Houston, or elsewhere on Broadway or its national tour, I strongly encourage you to do so. This is a beautiful, moving work of art by Anais Mitchell and deserves all of the recognition it receives. Hadestown is on-stage at the Hobby Center through October 9th. For more information about Broadway at the Hobby Center and the 2022-2023 season, please visit houston.broadway.com. The Tony Award-winning production of Six stops in Houston next from November 8-20 and is another must-see show from the Great White Way. For more Broadway updates, tune into my KTRU specialty show “Showstoppers” weekly on Sundays from 1:45 to 2:45 pm on air and online at ktru.org.