Hadestown has the finest score in the West End right now, and almost everything else you could reasonably ask for except a reason to care. That this folk-opera cult phenomenon can be so bewitching to listen to and so inert to experience is, depending on your tolerance for theatrical enigma, either the point or the problem.
Anaïs Mitchell’s Tony- and Grammy-winning musical, directed by Rachel Chavkin, takes the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and drops it into a Depression-era New Orleans juke joint ruled by a brooding industrial overlord. The young lovers meet in the warmth of a better season, but Orpheus’s devotion to his unfinished song leaves Eurydice hungry and vulnerable by winter, and when Hades offers her the grim promise of food and shelter in his underworld factory, she takes it. Orpheus follows her down, and the show tells you from the outset that you already know how this ends. Running alongside is the eroded marriage of Hades and his seasonal consort Persephone, who returns annually from her sojourn above ground with the reluctance of someone who has read the room. The whole machinery of Hadestown – the workers labouring behind the walls of a growing empire, the tyrant building himself a kingdom by persuading people that fear is safety – is Mitchell’s allegory for capitalism, climate collapse and the uses of compliance. It operates on the scale of myth, which is both its purpose and its limitation.
The new cast, in place since 10 March, serves the show unevenly. Rachel Adedeji’s Persephone arrives like a weather front: expansive, volatile, warm enough to melt something and sharp enough to cut something else. When she tears through “Our Lady of the Underground” in the second half, the Lyric comes briefly to life in a way the rest of the evening rarely manages. Her physical command of the role – grief and appetite locked in permanent negotiation – is exactly what the part demands. In the long underworld sequence where Orpheus must convince the enslaved workers to hope again, Adedeji’s Persephone offers the audience what the character offers him: the possibility that something in this place can still be moved. Persephone has been a reliable highlight across every cast of this production, and Adedeji sustains that record with authority.
Clive Rowe’s Hermes, narrator and moral conscience of the piece, is a trickier proposition. The Olivier winner commands real affection from the moment he ambles onstage, and his warmth is felt. But the role needs more than warmth. It needs a quality of watchfulness and coiled authority that can tip into something troubling, a sense that Hermes has seen this story end badly many times and is choosing to tell it anyway. Rowe’s account felt effortful rather than effortless, a distinguished career worn visibly on the sleeve where the character needs to wear it somewhere less obvious. A West End legend, perhaps, in need of a different kingdom.
The harder problem is Hades. Alastair Parker is a capable actor with a National Theatre pedigree, but the role is a cliff face that only a performer of rare and specific voltage can illuminate from the inside. Patrick Page on Broadway, or Zachary James in the original West End cast, both located in Hades a genuine horror dressed as a business proposition. Parker’s reading is cooler and more managed, which is a legitimate choice until you realise the cool never crackles. “Why We Build the Wall,” a satire on authoritarian control that Mitchell wrote years before it became a headline, sits at the centre of the first act as an opportunity for theatrical menace. Here it lands with more logic than dread, which is not quite the same thing.
Marley Fenton sings Orpheus beautifully. The part requires a specific high-register purity and he has it, particularly in the Act One climax “Wait for Me,” where the descending lanterns do much of the emotional heavy lifting and the voice floats through the shifting light with something close to grace. But Orpheus as written offers almost nothing for an actor to work with beyond yearning and oblivion, and no amount of craft can build a three-dimensional character from a walking metaphor. When Eurydice makes her fatal second choice in the closing sequence, you feel for her. You understand him.
Which brings us to the larger question hanging over the whole production. The dramatic engine here is not suspense but accumulating feeling, and accumulating feeling requires the central relationship to gain some weight. It never quite does. The score – a mosaic of folk, jazz and New Orleans brass delivered by Chavkin’s seven-piece onstage band with considerable skill – keeps suggesting emotional depth that the plotting never delivers. Rachel Hauck’s bar-cum-factory set barely changes all evening, and Chavkin’s direction is most compelling in the big architectural moments: the revolve grinding beneath Orpheus’s feet as he descends, or the closing reset in which the old story simply begins again. Between these peaks, the pace tests faith.
Hadestown has a devoted following that finds in it something transformative, and that devotion is not mystifying – the musical ambition here is real and rare. But for every moment that arrives fully formed, there are three more where the road to hell turns out to be rather long. Rachel Adedeji excepted, this is a cast still finding its footing. The show is looking for something to do with them.