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lokifanI saw Hadestown at the weekend - even better than the last time! I saw it in 2018 and was like ‘hmm, I see why people like it but it didn’t set my world on fire’. This time I enjoyed it way more, though I find its politics good but depressing.
It’s got a vague 1930s-America vibe but it’s still the gods. Basically Hades and Persephone are on the outs, leading to shorter summers and almost no springs or autumns, as she shoves her way out fast and he calls her back too early. Orpheus is working on a song ‘to bring the world back into tune’ by reminding the gods of their love. He meets and marries Eurydice, ‘a hungry young girl’; when she’s alone and cold and starving over winter, she ends up going to Hades and agreeing to go to the underworld with him. Hades is looking for a girl who’ll appreciate ‘a gilded cage’ even if she ends up an exploited worker. Orpheus goes to rescue her from unending toil, plays a song to bring Hades and Persephone at least starting to remember why they loved each other, and tries to save Eurydice; naturally, it doesn’t work, because this is a tragedy and we know how it ends. The cycle continues, we’ll keep singing the song and telling the tale, and Orpheus and Eurydice will keep meeting and falling.
Reasons I loved this production more than the 2018 London one: almost entirely because the new Hermes and Orpheus worked WAY better for me, and the Eurydice and Persephone equally well. Orpheus in 2018 came off as such a white-boy-with-acoustic-guitar, that annoying archetype. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was deliberate - I mean, the boy working on a song does immediately call up Roger-from-Rent associations - but it meant I just never warmed to him. The current Orpheus seems much more vulnerable, wide-eyed in his sudden attraction to Eurydice, and I liked him a lot more. I liked that the actor kept his Scottish accent, and all the ‘yes’ moments were turned into ‘aye’s, etc.
Hermes’ Trinidadian (?I think) accent charmed me, too; I just liked the actors getting to keep their variety of accents. And I found this Hermes just electric and so incredibly charming, and given their role that made a real difference. Plus I always like to like a Hermes, cos I’m a partisan for trickster gods :)
I do like the ending - I like that it feels like it might not happen, but of course Orpheus looks back and Eurydice is lost to him. I like that Hades and Persephone don’t unambiguously get back together, but there’s a chance; it feels like the only way to make it work, given the whole world coming back into tune relies on that but Hades has been so unremittingly awful. The idea of the tragedy, the sad song, that humans keep telling, and that we raise our glasses to the sad songs - it’s poignant. I do find the whole cycle idea, the way it begins again… idk I get the meta of it, seeing it in a theatre where the musical’s performed eight times a week, but when it’s connected to the politics it’s so unbelievably depressing.
The musical really leans into, asselenak put it, ‘Hades = Pluto = plutocrat’. Hades is the god of gold, oil, petrol, etc; his dead work for him, in unending labour; Eurydice signs an exploitative contract with him. (There’s a great line about ‘who finds work for idle hands’ - if Hades is the devil, it’s because he’s unfettered capitalism and ‘work ethic’ bullshit!) Orpheus basically becomes a union organiser in the second half, leading the dead into rebellion. Hades is the god of capitalism and classism and xenophobia; one of his first lines is that he’s “got riots to quell”. It’s really great! So the tragic ending of ‘yeah Orpheus never saves her, but we’ll keep singing their story’ also has this real element of like… yeah people try and change the world but it never works, the cycle continues, Watt Tayler got murdered and so do today’s organisers. Doooooom. I dunno, maybe I need to listen to the lyrics more closely or something? Would love to hear if you disagree! but to me it didn’t feel like ‘it didn’t work but we’ll keep trying!’, it seemed like ‘we’ll keep trying but it’ll never work.’
Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it; there are a ton of great songs there. But oof. Need to see The Battle of Cable Street again to recover.
It’s got a vague 1930s-America vibe but it’s still the gods. Basically Hades and Persephone are on the outs, leading to shorter summers and almost no springs or autumns, as she shoves her way out fast and he calls her back too early. Orpheus is working on a song ‘to bring the world back into tune’ by reminding the gods of their love. He meets and marries Eurydice, ‘a hungry young girl’; when she’s alone and cold and starving over winter, she ends up going to Hades and agreeing to go to the underworld with him. Hades is looking for a girl who’ll appreciate ‘a gilded cage’ even if she ends up an exploited worker. Orpheus goes to rescue her from unending toil, plays a song to bring Hades and Persephone at least starting to remember why they loved each other, and tries to save Eurydice; naturally, it doesn’t work, because this is a tragedy and we know how it ends. The cycle continues, we’ll keep singing the song and telling the tale, and Orpheus and Eurydice will keep meeting and falling.
Reasons I loved this production more than the 2018 London one: almost entirely because the new Hermes and Orpheus worked WAY better for me, and the Eurydice and Persephone equally well. Orpheus in 2018 came off as such a white-boy-with-acoustic-guitar, that annoying archetype. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was deliberate - I mean, the boy working on a song does immediately call up Roger-from-Rent associations - but it meant I just never warmed to him. The current Orpheus seems much more vulnerable, wide-eyed in his sudden attraction to Eurydice, and I liked him a lot more. I liked that the actor kept his Scottish accent, and all the ‘yes’ moments were turned into ‘aye’s, etc.
Hermes’ Trinidadian (?I think) accent charmed me, too; I just liked the actors getting to keep their variety of accents. And I found this Hermes just electric and so incredibly charming, and given their role that made a real difference. Plus I always like to like a Hermes, cos I’m a partisan for trickster gods :)
I do like the ending - I like that it feels like it might not happen, but of course Orpheus looks back and Eurydice is lost to him. I like that Hades and Persephone don’t unambiguously get back together, but there’s a chance; it feels like the only way to make it work, given the whole world coming back into tune relies on that but Hades has been so unremittingly awful. The idea of the tragedy, the sad song, that humans keep telling, and that we raise our glasses to the sad songs - it’s poignant. I do find the whole cycle idea, the way it begins again… idk I get the meta of it, seeing it in a theatre where the musical’s performed eight times a week, but when it’s connected to the politics it’s so unbelievably depressing.
The musical really leans into, as
selenak put it, ‘Hades = Pluto = plutocrat’. Hades is the god of gold, oil, petrol, etc; his dead work for him, in unending labour; Eurydice signs an exploitative contract with him. (There’s a great line about ‘who finds work for idle hands’ - if Hades is the devil, it’s because he’s unfettered capitalism and ‘work ethic’ bullshit!) Orpheus basically becomes a union organiser in the second half, leading the dead into rebellion. Hades is the god of capitalism and classism and xenophobia; one of his first lines is that he’s “got riots to quell”. It’s really great! So the tragic ending of ‘yeah Orpheus never saves her, but we’ll keep singing their story’ also has this real element of like… yeah people try and change the world but it never works, the cycle continues, Watt Tayler got murdered and so do today’s organisers. Doooooom. I dunno, maybe I need to listen to the lyrics more closely or something? Would love to hear if you disagree! but to me it didn’t feel like ‘it didn’t work but we’ll keep trying!’, it seemed like ‘we’ll keep trying but it’ll never work.’ Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it; there are a ton of great songs there. But oof. Need to see The Battle of Cable Street again to recover.
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Date: 2024-10-22 11:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-26 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-23 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-26 12:35 pm (UTC)Mmm, that makes sense. I think because Orpheus is the one who's sparking the rebellion against Hades, the fact that he loses Eurydice and we cycle back to him meeting her again and knowing it won't work makes that bigger progress feel lost to me too? But yeah I think it depends on the staging.
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Date: 2024-10-26 04:59 pm (UTC)Okay, that's definitely not a staging I've seen! Apparently that was kicked around in workshop but never hit the stage until London, according to what I've since looked up. I've only ever seen it close out on the Hadestown workers in one form or the other, which is why it gave me the sense of progress because the story now lived with the workers despite it not working out for Orpheus and Eurydice. Bringing it back to the couple specifically definitely wouldn't work for me.
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Date: 2024-10-28 08:48 am (UTC)Okay wow, THANK YOU because that's crucial information I'd totally missed!!!! And now people talking about how much they love it and its politics makes WAY more sense - it always seemed so depressing to me. That non-London staging would've left me with very different feelings. Especially on the semi-uplifting final lines about raising our cups.
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Date: 2024-11-03 10:53 am (UTC)This entire conversation is fascinating to me because I have never seen another staging than the 2016 New York Theatre Workshop which was the original off-Broadway production of Hadestown and it did end with Hermes' re-singing of the story leading directly into Persephone's toast to Orpheus, but it didn't leave a sense of hopeless entrapment or political-mythical futility, which sounds like a factor of some of the changes between the two versions. I didn't know before now that the lyrics of the ending differ slightly, for example, in a way which would make a difference to me.
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Date: 2024-10-23 09:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-10-26 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-23 10:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-11-27 05:46 pm (UTC)Lokifan's great. (And I posted about the idea here: https://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/358449.html and on Tumblr: https://lokifan.tumblr.com/post/159080106234/romance-in-potter-is-a-mystery#notes so it'd be great if you could link one/both.)