Month: June 2019

Music Break: Hadestown is now a Broadway Musical, with a Climate Message

I love seeing an artist build something with so much love and perseverance over a long haul.

Writer/Composer Anaïs Mitchell, in a video interview below, says, “At the time that I wrote it, I was thinking about climate change, and migrant people, and who among us in a place of relative wealth and security is not going to want to be behind a wall.
The idea of a wall is a mythic idea – it’s effective when people are feeling vulnerable.”

I’ve posted the uncanny theme from “Hadestown” before. The show might be the most off of off-Broadway musicals ever created, having been birthed in basements and libraries in rural Vermont over a decade ago.
I happened to catch Mitchell performing selections at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival quite a few years ago, and the music has only become more striking and relevant since.
Now it’s hit the big time, no doubt in no small part attributable to the uncanny relevance of the dark theme song.

Rolling Stone:

The set of Hadestown, the Broadway musical up for 14 Tony Awards on June 9th, features a set with wildly swinging lamps and a trap door that hurls people into the underworld. But as the show’s auteur, Anaïs Mitchell, demonstrates, the show wasn’t always so hi-tech. Putting down the iced beverage she’s sipping in a coffee shop in Times Square, a few streets south of the theater hosting Hadestown, Mitchell remembers the way the earliest version of the show tackled a scene in which one of the leading characters is bitten by a poisonous snake.

more from Rolling Stone:

“Why do we build the wall, my children?” asked folksinger Greg Brown, playing the character Hades, on the 2010 recording of Anaïs Mitchell’s “folk opera,” Hadestown.
“We build the wall to keep us free!” answers the chorus, over ghostly pedal steel.
“Who do we call the enemy, my children?” he continued.
“The enemy is poverty, and the wall keeps out the enemy, and we build the wall to keep us free!” his subjects respond, circular logic building in concatenate phrases until it reaches the rub: “We have work and they have none, and our work is never done… and the war is never won.”

This chilling scene remains the centerpiece of Hadestown, a love story and class-struggle parable based on the Orpheus myth that arrives on the same Broadway stage Bruce Springsteen worked for 14 months prior. The cast has changed from Mitchell’s original LP (where Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, the Low Anthem’s Ben Knox Miller and activist folk hero Ani DiFranco joined Mitchell and Brown in the leads). But the work’s musical integrity and proletariat spirit remains largely intact.

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