"Hadestown" Became Westernized With Showtunes
And Why I Think This Orpheus is An Absolute Chad
One of the coolest things about mythologies from the ancient times is that anything goes. The characters may stay the same, the themes may be one emotional package to hold onto, but the details is where each iteration seeks to stand out.
And as we all know: The devil is in the details.
The tragic story of Orpheus and Eurydice is a tale as old as time. Orpheus is a fucking fantastic musician. His music woos and enraptures all who hear the faintest strains of his lyre on the wind.
Eurydice is a nymph also charmed by Orpheus’ song, but RING-A-DING-DING it’s so fucking cute because they’re madly in love with each other.
They marry, or are about to marry, when tragedy befalls the happy couple: Eurydice is bitten by a snake and taken to Hades all too soon. Devastated, Orpheus determines to travel to the Underworld with just his voice and his instrument.
He makes it pretty damn far. Past the three-headed dog Cerberus, past Charon the ferryman on the River Styx. Actually, he manages to get Hades to cry and compromise a deal for Eurydice’s return topside.
Except except except. Hades agrees, but Orpheus cannot, under any circumstance, look back at Eurydice until they are both touched by the light of the land of the living.
The end, the greatest tragedy when Orpheus is about to embrace his wife on mortal land, is when he turns too soon to see the ghost of Eurydice vanish back to Hades.
A tragedy. A Greek one at that. One that will always be a tragedy, and can never not be a tragedy.
Hadestown delivers the same emotional blow when our Broadway Orpheus (Reeve Carney) is overcome with doubt and looks behind himself to see his precious Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) before he makes it out of the Underworld.
And just like that, she’s gone yet again.
I’m sorry if that’s a spoiler. But this story’s been out for a few thousand years and if you haven’t gotten the memo yet, then you reading this is as good as it’s going to get for you <3
In the Broadway retelling of this myth, Orpheus is writing a song to bring back spring, to make all the wrong things in the world, right. He’s a poor boy and a poet, but Eurydice falls in love with his hope and optimism.
Unfortunately, you can’t eat hope and optimism and in the steampunk/dystopian world they live in, Eurydice cuts a deal with a cruel man the next town over: Hades.
And so our myth takes on a different tone, but it sounds much the same, Eurydice having a little more agency, but still a slave to the whims of The Fates.
Stage Design & Music
I love moving stages. Er, I love stages with massive set pieces that functionally works in every scene and helps tell the narrative of the stage play.
In Hamilton they had a revolving stage. A two-tier behemoth behind it that the massive cast of characters flounced and pranced upon.
In Hadestown, they have what I could only assume was a barebones descending elevator center stage and one of those walk-a-lators you see in airports running across the front of the stage.
Separately, all very interesting pieces, but much better together. A complaint of mine was how stand-alone the moving pieces were utilized. Yes, only using it for special moments in the musical made it seem fantastical and surprising, but I just know it could have been incorporated in more ways to really flesh out the feel of the world, instead of being used just the once or twice for symbolism.
Some of the musicians sat onstage and that played really well into the jazzy, slummed out and cramped feel of the bar-world, but it also took up precious real-estate the actors could not move through. I did like the metaphor of the musicians being muses themselves, giving musical narration to Orpheus’ plight and the watchers of their tragic story.
The music made you want to move. You felt it in the rip of the trombone and the brisk syncopation of the piano. The music and the solos that horned out were characters themselves and contrasted with the melodious ballads this Orpheus was oft likely to sing.
Power of the Myth
The thing about myths is we know what is supposed to happen. There’s only so much flair we can add to spice up a familiar story before it becomes too different, before it’s something else entirely, before we feel a disconnect from the characters.
“How much can you change and get away with it, before your turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder?”
-Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light, Richard Siken
Going into this musical is the assumption that you are familiar with the Orpheus and Eurydice mythos. Maybe not a die-hard nerd, but some sort of awareness. It’s not necessary, but it adds depth to a story that lacks it. The presumption of audience awareness is what makes this musical work, and without that it feels a little strung along and loose.
Like Shakespeare’s Romeo’s and Juliet, we know that Orpheus and Eurydice is a tragedy.
It’s in the way that it is told that makes us stay seated for the entire performance.
Life Isn’t Fair
The basis of this musical draws from the ire that “Life isn’t fair.”
When we meet Eurydice in “Any Way The Wind Blows,” she is a lost, beaten, and down on her luck young girl. The Fates themselves take it upon themselves to quite literally fuck with her.
She cannot catch a break, and even her meeting with Orpheus is tainted with suffering because in this version, in spite of how romantic their love story is often portrayed, he chooses his music over her.
And she leaves to try, try as she might, to find a better place for herself.
Orpheus is still trying to write a song to bring spring back because he believes that doing so will solve all their problems. And a solution, using the skills he has, for the woman he loves? Of course he has to keep at it. He keeps his head down and doggedly writes and rewrites his lyrics.
But his failure comes from not knowing when to quit. When being a starving artist to him, supersedes that of his wife, then there is a problem and I don’t care how you try to sugarcoat this version of it, that is what happens.
Pretty words from a poet can’t fill the hunger in her belly. And so Eurydice, ignored by her lover and trying to find a scrap to eat, makes a deal with Hades and leaves, though she doesn’t fully understand the consequences of her actions when she originally makes the deal.
And Orpheus, idiot that he is, doesn’t even notice until it’s too late and she is long gone.
The fact that Orpheus makes it so far into the Underworld and almost makes it back, is devastating.
In such a Westernized version, Orpheus being the root cause of his own suffering is comparable to Oedipus and his cursed self.
In this version, Orpheus is his own crippling Kryptonite.
But I like the Greek tragedy version more: where Orpheus and Eurydice are just kind, gentle souls, abused and tossed about by the cruelty of a world unjust; their original story is a tragedy because no matter what they do, they are destined to suffer. Every positive action they take, every success they achieve only adds kindling to the fire of their demise.
It’s not their fault. They are reacting to a world dominated by gods and cruel prophecies. It’s their eternal optimism in the original myth, in the face of everything gone wrong, that makes that love story sing through the centuries.
Chaddification of Orpheus
Upon listening to the musical on Spotify and then watching the (almost completely) original cast on Broadway, I was finally able to explain to myself and others why I hated this Orpheus.
Probably because in this version, he was the root of all the problems. Not directly, but by his inaction and self-absorbed music-making, he pushes Eurydice away and loses her in the same vein.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Orpheus in most other retellings, the Hades video game by Supergiant giving him a melodious voice and a grief to match the notes he hits.
Something felt off about this Broadway Orpheus…and for me it was his rendition of the character.
He’s a poet, he’s emotional and heartfelt.
He’s been blessed by the gods and is just so damn talented that even the birds stop to listen to him sing.
But that talent only brings suffering.
He’s such an airhead here. Too involved in his love for music making that nothing else matters, and I found that one-dimensionality for such a beloved character, to be blasphemous.
It feels like this Orpheus is so in love with himself because of how good a musician he is, when my understanding of Orpheus is that he is so in love with music and the ability to share that love with others.
It’s such a small, minor detail about intentionality that gave me the ick for this Broadway character the entire time.
I talked to a friend about it and while she didn’t agree with my dislike of this version of Orpheus, she couldn’t help but nod along to my pointless rant.
“I get it,” she said. “Orpheus is a poet and loves his music and that’s great and all but if this was any other man and he ignored his wife for something else he really really likes— like say, football, then he’d just be an ass. He’d be ignoring his wife because he’s too invested in a sport. But Orpheus is a poet.
“So it’s a little different. Still an ass. But a little different.”
This Orpheus has all the worst traits any retelling of the myth could have had and his one redeeming quality is his music. But when that fails, when even his music is not enough to save his own little world, there isn’t much to make us like him.
Which is a goddamn brutal take on Hadestown’s Orpheus, but all in all?
I had a fantastic time at this Broadway musical.
Would recommend.