“You got a lonesome road to walk
And it ain’t along the railroad track,
And it ain’t along the blacktop tar
You’ve walked a hundred times before.
I’ll tell you where the real road lies:
Between your ears, behind your eyes.
That is the path to paradise.
Likewise, the road to ruin.”
“Wait for Me (Reprise)”, Hadestown
It’s been a bit of a whirlwind time, these past couple weeks. I’m a bit behind on some of my projects, for sure, but it’s been worth it to take time to do things I’ve long wanted to do. See some friends, take some trips, eat some great food. The highlight of this season, bar none, has to be my recent trip to New York to see my favorite musical, Hadestown, with a good friend of mine I haven’t seen since before the apocalypse.
As for the entire trip to New York, I offer the same answer I give everyone when asked how visiting New York goes: I spent too much, ate too much, and slept too little.
As for Hadestown? Transcendent.
I had fallen in love with the musical and the soundtrack long before seeing it even seemed like an option, and why wouldn’t I? It’s a jazzy, post-apocalyptic retelling of Greek myths with stinging emotional beats and needlelike societal critique rolled in two larger-than-life love stories. Hadestown has the advantage of being a sung-through musical at that, meaning you can listen to the entire thing and get the full story (albeit sans visuals). It had the disadvantage of opening on Broadway in March of 2019, giving it one glorious year before the rise of the age of COVID (part of the main reason seeing it seemed iffy (also it’s taken until recently for me to actually enjoy cities, a larger point)).
Those are the fairly surface-level reasons anyone would love anything, I think. The music is incredible (especially the vocal performances), the stories are interwoven beautifully, and the overt messages are uniquely timely (even if “Why Do We Build the Wall” predates the message it seems to send now).
There are, however, two reasons this musical struck such a cord (is that a pun? Can it be a pun?). The first is the way in which Hadestown examines the point of and structure of stories themselves. Hermes, Hadestown’s functional narrator, tell us from the very beginning that what we’re about to watch is an old song, and it’s a sad song, but that they’re going to sing it anyway. The reason given? The thing the whole cast tries to sell you on? The beauty, the heartbreak, and the soul of Hadestown? Hope. Maybe it will turn out this time. Even though you know, if you’ve even a passing memory of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, even though you’ve listened to the album a hundred times, even though they tell you what’s coming- they try as though it isn’t.
Nobody tries harder than Orpheus himself, the boy who Hermes likes because he shows you how the world could be.
There’s the deceit of every story, from the powerfully sad to the boundlessly happy. That they’re stories, that they exist to convince whoever is listening to them or reading them that the worlds they’re describing could be. Sometimes it’s as simple as getting you invested in the characters, or as grand an act of deceit as trying to get you believe in worlds with magic, and dragons, and underworlds. I think some of the most truly transcendent stories are the ones who, even when read or heard a dozen times, still can convince you of how their worlds could be (ask how many times I’ve reread The Sun Also Rises.) That’s well and good from an audience’s perspective. But it applies to creators, too. Every song, every book, every performance in existence went through dozens if not hundreds of rewrites, of replays, of edits and rehearsals. There’s a convincing trick there too, of showing every time the conviction of telling it anew. It’s there in one of the lines near the end of the show, expressed by Hermes:
“’Cause here’s the thing: To know how it ends, and still begin to sing it again as if it may turn out this time, I learned that from a friend of mine.”
As someone working (struggling) through mountains of rewrites and edits, it’s sentiments like that which help me keep focus. I think it applies to all artists, and to more than one different kind of work (as me how many times I say the same greeting tableside (I say as if serving isn’t a performance)) and I think it’s important to keep in mind when we may feel bored by our own work. It’s always going to be someone’s first time hearing the song, or reading those words, or witnessing that scene. Why not make sure they’re experiencing it with all the passion of it being the first time it’s ever happened?
The same sentiment expressed by that line, though, applies to the second area where this show so touches me. I don’t know if it ever was Anaïs Mitchell’s intention to create something that served as so helpful a guide for navigating mental illness, especially depression, but nevertheless Hadestown has helped me. Beyond just the sentiment of there being down days and either going to sleep or waking up clinging to the words, “sing it again as if it may turn out this time,” Hadestown depicts the darkness of despair and the light of hope through them better than most media with the intention of therein. Feeling the way my heart swelled the first time (and swells every time) during Eurydice’s final lines in “Wait for Me (Reprise)” or the anger, resentment, and reservation in Hade’s performance in “Why We Build the Wall” (political points aside, I once used the song to try and explain the feeling of isolation and spiraling depression brought on by COVID), to being overwhelmed by Orpheus’ toast to Persephone in “Livin’ it Up on Top,” that I now own on a flask, Hadestown speaks to the depths and peaks of humanity’s experiences in life, something which in the musical itself is aptly described as the “road to hell.”
Hadestown, of course, is a tragedy. When the end comes, it comes like a train. Even though you knew what it was, even though you were warned, even though that’s just how the story goes. You feel it. Others do, too. One of the things about seeing a show live is experiencing it alongside an audience, and the gasps in the final moments, and the hushed sobs around you, and the hand of your friend gripping yours and tightly as you are gripping theirs all seals in perfect, grotesque, beautiful harmony the weight of what you’re experiencing together. And, together, we stood, in a toast to “Orpheus, and all of us.”
It was as beautiful as the toast on my flask, now sitting on my little “Shelf of Inspiration” by my desk:
“To the world we dream about, and the one we live in now.”