Click here to read the full article.
The gods themselves get mostly shoved out of the picture in “The Odyssey,” as has been noted by some filmgoers who wished Zeus or Poseidon got in on the action instead of just being talked about. But Hades, at least,
has his day in another movie currently in theaters, which offers some serious interplay between men and immortals. It’s “Hadestown: The Musical,” the filming of one of the most acclaimed and successful Broadway musicals of the last decade. The hit show’s cinematic translation is predicted to make around $9 million at the U.S. box office this weekend, which would put it behind only the theatrical opening of the “Hamilton” film among grosses for a direct capture of a stage production. As it turns out, musical tragedy makes for perfectly fine summer counterprogramming after all, when the gods get to have their way.
“Hadestown” is not typical Broadway fare, of course: André Robin De Shields, who won a Tony in 2020 for playing the god Hermes, says he considers it a “folk opera.” Nearly any description of the plot, which reenacts the ancient story of Orpheus and Eurydice, is going to make it sound a bit esoteric by modern tuner standards, even before tacking on Americana musician Anaïs Mitchell’s unusually flavored, sung-through score. And yet the show has a massive cult, especially but not entirely among young people, that is at least as feverish in adoring intensity as “Hamilton’s.” It can only grow with the introduction into theaters of director Brett Sullivan’s brilliantly filmed adaptation, which is bound to draw untold numbers of newbies into its underworld, even as hardcore fans are bound to sign up for multiple trips before the movie’s scheduled one week in theaters is over.
On the eve of the film’s release, Variety talked with Mitchell, Sullivan and several of the five original Broadway cast members who reunited for the movie — Reeve Carney, Eva Noblezada, Patrick Page and De Shields — about why “Hadestown” seems to have found a permanent foothold in American culture and what went in to making this rendering such a surprisingly indelible cinematic experience.
Says Mitchell, “In this film, there was a really beautiful collaboration between Rachel Chavkin (the stage director) and Brett from Steam Motion, who directed the film, and they did a lot of close work on the edits and figuring out how to present the story. There’s so much emotional access to the characters because of the close-ups, and you can see things like a tear rolling down someone’s cheek or someone’s lip twitching that you wouldn’t be able to see from the audience. But you also never lose sight of the fact that it’s a stage show. There are enough shots where you’re seeing the stage in context of the audience, and seeing the beautiful theater, which is the Lyric Theatre on the West End.” Sullivan doesn’t shy completely away from offering long shots that incorporate the enthusiastic crowd, or even reaction shots, but mostly he stays locked into what’s happening on stage, so that it feels closer to a bona fide movie musical than something that sounds as reductionist as a “capture.”
The five original Broadway principals — also including Amber Gray, as Persephone — got the old gang back together and went into the West End production five weeks before the film was shot in front of three live audiences. Performances were filmed in quick succession on a Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Saturday evening; there was also closeup filming done of some of the numbers while an audience was not present, to afford the cameras some views that would have spoiled things for paying ticketgoers.
Says Reeve, who plays Orpheus, “Watching the film, we can really feel the love that the creative team, including Brett and all the cameramen, have for the piece. Because the planning that went into it was a Herculean task, really. Every shot you see in the film, we only had one take at it. For the Friday night, Saturday matinee and Saturday evening performances, each time there were four to six cameras that were shooting simultaneously. And for each performance, the cameras were moved to an entirely different part of the theater. So the end result is that it looks so cinematic because (added up) it was like a 30-camera shoot.”
There is some delayed gratification here. “There was a desire and an attempt to do this in the winter of 2022,” says Carney, “because Amber Gray, the first cast member to join the show, was about to leave the show, and so they were like, ‘This is our only chance to capture it with all of you guys.’ That didn’t end up working at that time, so we didn’t think it would ever happen. So when we got the call saying ‘Hey, we have another chance to do this, but the only way this is gonna work is if we bring you guys over to London during this cast changeover that’s happening,’ we were really grateful, because having a second chance really lit a fire under everyone’s butt to make sure we get this right.” He was ultimately glad they ended up waiting. “There’s something really magical about the Lyric Theatre in London that allowed for this capture to be something that I don’t think it would’ve been, exactly, at the Walter Kerr (in New York). The stage is three-quarters the size in London, which really lent itself beautifully to a cinematic experience.”
For fans who have only lived with the cast album for the last seven years, getting to finally put a face to Patrick Page’s beyond-baritone voice will be a revelation. But even those who saw one of his hundreds of performances will find something new in the camera’s tight focus as he wavers on whether to let the mortal characters get their way or not.
“The wonderful thing about the film is that it allows the audience member to participate in things that were always part of those performances, but which even sitting in the fourth or fifth row of the audience you might not catch,” Page says. “A close-up comes right in and reads the actor’s thoughts. So that’s where you have the depth of all of that experience of the five original players who have layers and layers of subtext and and relationship-building along with the words and the music. We always knew that was there, and I would sometimes try to tell other people who were performing in the show, ‘Well, do you know what actually happens in that moment?’ Because of course what actually happened in the moment only happened in my head, or between Amber’s eyes and my eyes, or in Andre’s turn of phrase, or whatever it was. And yet for us, those things were as real as the notations or the poetry.”
De Shields insists the actors didn’t consciously tone anything down to adjust for the cameras getting close in. “It’s only in film that you have to be cautioned not to play to the camera, because in the theater the audience is the camera,” says the show’s Hermes. “So when the cameras were actually there, we didn’t adjust any attitudes or any focus. We just had to do what we knew and what we had been feeling, in some instances, for two, three, four, five years.”
Page, being interviewed alongside De Shields, jumps in to say that he might have had his focus more tightly trained. “Now that I’m thinking, Andre, maybe the only difference is that when you’re doing it eight times a week, you know exactly what you do at every moment. But perhaps there are times where you don’t actually do it; you sort of pretend to do it. Whereas on film, you know, it’s ‘I’ve gotta actually do this now or that damn camera’s gonna catch me. I can’t cheat.'”
“I never cheated!” protests De Shields.
“Oh, I saw you,” Page retorts, as they both laugh.
No relationship developed over the course of the original production quite like the one between Carney and Noblezada, who are now married. As they speak beside one another on their couch at home, with occasional cameos from their dog, Noblezada is wearing a “Reeva” T-shirt, reflecting how much fans of the couple have enjoyed the real-life shipping that went on off-stage as well as on it.
“Reeva… Somebody gave this to me as a gift,” she says. “I love it.”
“We sleep in these shirts at night,” cracks Carney.
“I did not sleep in this, just to be clear,” says Noblezada, setting the record straight. “I mean, we’re very grateful that people love the show and are big supporters of Reeva, individually and also together, because without that support we couldn’t really do what we do.”
It’s safe to say they did not let the fact that “Hadestown” is a romantic tragedy stand as a bad omen for their own burgeoning relationship?
“I don’t view ‘Hadestown’ as a tragedy,” counters Carney. “I view it as a piece designed to empower and embolden people to make a different decision and to choose a different ending. I see it as very optimistic and it’s a very hopeful piece, even though it is based upon a Greek tragedy. Everyone can have a different perspective, which is great, too. But I think that’s part of why young people keep coming back to it: I think deep down they know that they can change the world. I think it resonates with all age groups,” he adds, “but in terms of it resonating with young people in particular, I think it’s because it’s important to not forget who you were as a child, in order to make the changes in the world that our world so desperately needs.”
Carney admits he did spend a moment or three thinking about how it might be difficult to revisit the intensity of the show after being out of it for a good spell. “Yes, there was a bit of that hesitation,” he admits. “I was the last one to leave the show, and even for me it had been a year and a half between when I left the show and coming back into it. But I had a lot of amazing communication with Rachel Chavkin and Anaïs Mitchell about what exactly they wanted for this version of ‘Hadestown,’ because we had all performed such different versions of the character over the years. And that was really crucial in terms of getting all of us on the same page, because I knew we only had three performances to capture this. Once I got locked in with that, the only thing I said to them is, ‘I think I know where we’re going with this, and if that’s the case, I cannot have the haircut that I had in 2019.’ There’s so much that costume and hair and makeup informs to the audience about a character before they even say a word. So I was like, ‘All right. I know what we’re doing — but I gotta change the hair.’ That was my only non-negotiable.”
Noblezada, who has many of the most emotionally wreching moments in the show, wasn’t worried about any difficulty in finding all of that again after having had an extended break. “The good thing is, we don’t have to start from scratch. We have so much to pull from because the inner world of ‘Hadestown’ that we live in is so rich and so real. I mean, anybody who’s facing those issues would react with those emotions. And so you just have to know how to drop into your character’s body, and the world of ‘Hadestown’ — the lyrics, the blocking, the story, the pacing of it all — does the rest of it for you. I mean, it’s really like you get on a rollercoaster, and you know that you’re gonna have that almost vertical drop at a really high amount of speed, and you just have to strap down and lock in.
“It’s not difficult for me to get emotional,” Noblezada adds. “I’m a very emotional person. I’m a quintuple Pisces. I’m a rising Gemini, with the two faces, which means I was destined to be an actor. But I also think that Eurydice’s story has to be deeply emotional and tragic because she falls in love, and then everything’s taken away from her, and then she makes a really big choice that affects her life and her future. So it’s not easy to feel those every night, but it’s easy to get into it.”
Whatever adjustments the stage-to-film translation did or didn’t require of the cast, it was a normal day’s work for Sullivan, who is certainly foremost among the directors doing these live stage captures for cinematic special engagements. He’s done about a dozen of them to date, including big-screen versions of “Miss Saigon” (on which he actually worked with Noblezada, 10 years ago), “Waitress,” “Kinky Boots,” “Frozen,” “Aladdin,” “Kiss Me Kate” and “Starlight Express.” “Literally tomorrow I deliver ‘The,’ which we shot on Broadway for Netflix. That was almost the other end of the spectrum, a very effects-heavy show, and trying to relay live magic onto the screen was a different challenge.”
Sullivan has seen the change in attitude in the industry from a time in which there were questions about whether cinematic translations would hog all the interest that might otherwise go to keeping the ongoing stage productions going. “We tried it out with ‘Newsies’ with Disney quite a while ago [in 2017] and Tom Schumacher, who was heading up Disney theatrical, was like, ‘Let’s try this and see what happens.’ As it turns out, when the film did its event cinema thing, they got another couple of tours booked off the back of it just because the interest just got so wide again. That was a little bit of a proof in the pudding that, hey, these things can actually get the news out there, so to speak, and these things can co-exist.”
Some of the challenges in doing a “capture” are more obvious than others. “I mean, when you go to the theater, you’re basically watching a wide shot all night, and your eyes can go wherever they want to. And we’re making choices for you for the screen, including who to look at, at what particular point in time, through the editing or the close-ups. ?” Knowing full well that obviously it’s a live thing, you want to honor that and be truthful to the show as much as possible. But there are some film conventions that we have to lean into. It’s a dance, isn’t it?
“‘Stop Making Sense’ for me was the film that made me do what I do,” the director continues. “And I always wondered when I watched that, when I was probably 13, how did they get those shots close on stage, as well as the wide shots? I studied that thing backwards, and really that has become the template for me artistically: We need to see the actor’s eyes, and we also need to see the spectacle. ‘Stop Making Sense’ did that just so cleverly, so that’s been my benchmark for how to convey something live in an interesting way.”
Of what is unique about capturing “Hadestown,” Sullivan says, “The single set helped us, because the set doesn’t have traditional wings. The band is taking the space of traditional wings in a theater, which is great. It means we can shoot across, which gave us a sense of, like, the camera’s not always at the front. We’re getting into the sides, which helped with kind of the visual interest. And we have a lot of deep two-shots where there’s someone in the foreground and someone in the background, and we’re racking (focus) between the two. I was like, ‘OK, let’s reduce the cuts somehow. Let’s find the angles where we’ve always got a background person, or we’ve always got connections.’ So there’s all working in triangles, where someone’s listening and reacting to what the other person is singing, and we can try and make that visually interesting without cutting. So a lot of it was trying to search for these deep twos when we were designing the shots.”
One unexpected adjustment that had to be made: allowing for Page’s injury to his foot, which has him wearing a large boot and carry a cane for the entirety of the show. It’s not something that the director shoots around; he and Persephone still have a tender dance number toward the end of the show.
“Patrick had a wild ride,” says Mitchell. “You might have heard that he was injured during the rehearsal process, and that’s why he ended up in the live capture with this big boot on one of his legs. All of the actors actually were returning to the role after several years away from it, and partly they were falling back into their muscle memory, and then partly they had to kind of come at it in a new way, but most of all Patrick, because literally his dance moves had to be different and his blocking hit different because of his situation. But I feel like you feel them all authentically in their selves at the time of the taping, taking on these characters again with the added experience of six years of life that happened in between when we opened on Broadway and 2025.”
What’s the appeal that leads to multiple viewings of the stage production (and now, presumably, the film)? Sullivan says: “I would have to say that Anais’ music is just so good that that’s people’s entry point into it; the staying power of those songs is so effective. I mean, the last song in the show, I tear up every single time I hear it — that we’re gonna sing it again, even though we know the ending. … And there’s some universal truths that run through it. Some of it seems political as well about how the times have kind of shaped some of these things, when you listen to it. ‘The Wall’ was written before the whole discourse about the wall (that subsequently became a focus in real life for Donald Trump, as it prophetically was for Hades in the show). There’s a lot of things that resonate right now in the world as we search for the truth in various means.”
Page feels one moment in the script sums up the pull of the show… and it’s not one of Hades’ lines. “I think it’s in that one little toast of Orpheus’. I think it’s the tension between ‘the world we dream about and the one we live in now,’ and it’s that tension that we live in that I think attracts everyone to it — the possibility, and how do we get there? Because that tension isn’t somebody’s fault. But it’s a real thing, a real conflict. It’s a real paradox between what we wish could be and what is. And that, I think, is what keeps people in it. What do you think it is?”
Says De Shields: “To speak in the current vernacular, I think the audience feels, ‘I’m finally being seen.’ Simply that.”
Mitchell found herself being surprised by elements of her own show when she was able to suddenly study them on immaculately captured film. “I’ve seen it so many times that it’s hard to get a response sometimes because I know it so well,” she allows. “But there are moments that hit me different emotiuonally. Like, this version of Eva singing ‘Flowers’ feels so raw and huge and intimate. That felt like something new. And then I guess, there’s something about the fact that when you see it on film, you’re in the story, but then you’re also in the experience of the audience experiencing the story, you know? That feels like the story is not just the story; the story is what it has come to mean for people.
“I’ve seen the show a million times, but there were little things that struck me, like the way that a shadow of a character hits the set in a certain moment, or the subtle choreography of the Fates or the workers in the background when they’re kind of listening to the principal actors, and they’re moving in a way that supports the emotion of the singer. It’s subtle, but it’s always present, and I found it easier to focus on that in the film version. Because a lot of times I’m just obsessed with words. I’m, like, always, ‘How is it being phrased? What does the language sound like?’ But there’s this whole ‘nother level of what’s going on that is visual, image-based, impressionistic in a way.
“I think that sort of hit home a little more with this film: a sense of mystery for me, again, where I’m like, ‘Oh, I have no idea what this thing is.’ As many years of my life as I’ve put into it, I have no idea what this thing is or what it means to people. It’s got its own life. It’s moving around the world on its own legs.”
Mitchell’s key points of identification with her handiwork have shifted. “When I started writing it in my early 20s. I for sure identified with Orpheus at that time, and Eurydice, and the idealism. I still do at some level, but I’m now in my 40s and I identify much more with the story of the older marriage [between Hades and Persephone] — is there a chance for redemption with these people that have been together for years and years? And I relate to the role of Hermes, who has to retell this sad story again and again and be the storyteller. There’s something about all those characters that are present in this story that has allowed me to stay alive with it, from what I passed through my early 20s to being like, ‘I’m still interested in it.’ Like, I’m still interested, now, in what’s going through Hades’ head here.”
The show opened on Broadway in 2019, but in a different way of thinking, it is celebrating both a 10th anniversary and 20th anniversary this year. It was 2016 when “Hadestown” first opened off-Broadway, but 2006 when Mitchell first began doing an early version of it with musician friends in folk clubs, like McCabe’s in Santa Monica.
“Someone else mentioned that to me the other day — the 2016, 2006 (anniversary) thing — and it hadn’t crossed my mind,” says Mitchell. “It’s crazy to me to think that I’ve been living alongside of this piece in one way or another for 20 years, which is almost half my life. But the story for me is that it’s still alive, and the fact that we get to keep telling this story night after night on Broadway and the West End, and that we now have this film document so that we can reach folks who wouldn’t make it to the theater otherwise. It’s not a reenactment of what it was in 2016. Obviously the text is evolving less than it did 10 years ago, but as a piece of theater, I think people are still finding new ways to present it. And actually, a lot of young people are putting it on. We released the rights for high schools, and that’s been really moving, to see young people find themselves in the story and in the characters. I get all kinds of requests from high schools, like, ‘Can we have nine Fates?’ ‘Can we have 100 workers?’ ‘Can we have everyone non-binary?’ It’s very cool to see what they’re doing.”
Carney has a thought about what resonates for all demographics about the show. “As actors, one of our jobs is to constantly be expanding our capacity for empathy,” he says. “Because there are times when we can draw from our own life, but there are times when you may not have exactly experienced something, but if you can empathize with it, then you can put that into the character. I think empathy is something we need more of, and I think the show, hopefully, will continue to encourage more of that. Because I, for one, do not think that empathy is… what is the word that was used recently?” He searches for the language Elon Musk made famous. “I don’t think empathy is a detriment in any way, or a weakness.” Even in hardboiled Hadestown, that would probably get a murmur of assent.
