What IS your favorite version of The Odyssey?
Ooo, speaking of opinions of mine that will have certain segments of my audience scowl at me with disappointment, I'm going to have to be cringe and say Epic the Musical. I am prepared to defend this opinion, though, so everyone who rolled their eyes just now can feel free to eat my entire ass about it.
Ok, so, at its core, The Odyssey is about a man who loves his family and home, and is forced to put that love to the test when he's put in all manner of horrible situations on his return journey to said family and home. No matter how divergent or loyal the adaptation is, whether you go beat for beat with Homer's poem or shuffle it all around in a different setting and tone altogether like Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, that will be the core of the story. Hero wants to get home but good holy fuck is he TESTED in the process.
Most adaptations simplify the story, omitting some of the episodes of the narrative and/or combining them with others to further streamline things, and in my experience most of them tone down the fantastical elements as a result. Which, boo, hiss, I love the fantastical elements! The Odyssey is one of the most fun Greek myths because its full of monsters, gods, witches, and all sorts of supernatural bullshit!
In the case of Epic the Musical, all those fantastical elements are not only retained, but if anything emphasized further than they had already been in Homer's poem. This is not a grounded, toned down, realistic version of The Odyssey - it's The Odyssey as a modern fantasy, well, epic! Spiritually speaking, it's The Odyssey if it was set on the Grand Line rather than in ancient Greece, and it fucking rules.
And, more importantly, it makes sure to marry all those fantastical elements to the emotional core of the story. Every god, monster, witch, and obstacle is adapted in a way that goes to great pains to highlight how they serve as a foil to Odysseus - how, in many ways, these are people on the same journey, meeting at different stages of their respective trips, and the clash that comes from those different perspectives of the same awful trip is just exquisite character work. And since each of these encounters contributes so much to Odysseus's character arc, you can't cut any of them without harming the work itself - it made every monster, god, and supernatural occurrence vital and indispensable, which, to be fair, I'd also argue is true of Homer's poem, but it's nice to see someone put emphasis on the purpose of these supernatural elements when so many adaptations try to downplay them.
It does all that while ALSO placing a great deal of emphasis on the human cast and their arcs. Odysseus and Eurylochus are both so wonderfully fleshed out, and both Penelope and Telemachus are given far more characterization than most adaptations give them WITHOUT hampering the pacing and flow of the story. One-off antagonists like Circe, Calypso, and Polyphemus are all given a great deal of substance and characterization that adds to Odysseus's journey rather than distract from it, and holy shit the gods are all so bold and dynamic in this take, every time one of them steps into the story it feels like a Big Event. (shout out to the two songs they gave to Hermes for being almost perfectly within my vocal range btw)
The changes it makes to the story are all thoughtful and make perfect sense with the structure of this version of the tale - I've talked about Odysseus and his men killing the sirens in Epic before so I won't retread that here, but I would like to focus on the choice that probably pissed off a lot of classicists: namely, removing Odysseus's infidelity with Circe and Calypso, and instead presenting him as totally and completely loyal to Penelope.
The argument against this, I imagine, is that it's whitewashing his character and removing his rough edges and another example of modern retellings of Greek myth being too sanitized et cetera et cetera. So here's where I'm going to get very heretical:
Odysseus cheating on Penelope is a flaw in the story-telling of Homer's The Odyssey.
The core of this story, as we established, is that this man loves his family and home, and will do anything to get there. It is all about taking the virtuous and laudable trait of loyalty and showing how circumstance can twist it into a tragic flaw - the sheer number of horrific deeds Odysseus commits to get back to his wife makes us unsure of whether we truly root for him in the end of the tale.
Having him cheat on his wife - showing disloyalty - weakens that conflict. It is incongruent with his characterization, with his arc, and the overall themes of the work.
Now, we can go over how historically it wouldn't have been a big deal in his time, how men in ancient Greece weren't expected to be faithful but women were because ancient Greece was one of the most viciously misogynistic cultures in all of human history, how the fact that Circe and Calypso are gods muddies Odysseus's ability to refuse their advances et cetera et cetera, but all of that shit is a fucking footnote. When you read the story with the mindset that, you know, women are people who do not like to be cheated on, Odysseus cheating on Penelope breaks the emotional core of the story. It is a flaw in the writing. It is a fatal inconsistency. It is a mistake that Homer made, and we can justify why he made that mistake all we like, but it doesn't change the fact that, as story-telling goes, it was a mistake.
Epic: The Musical does not try to white-wash Odysseus - he kills a baby at the end of the second musical number in the whole thing, for fuck's sake, and that's not the last horrible thing he knowingly does on his way to get home. It does, however, make him consistent to ensure that emotional core holds up. Odysseus is loyal to Penelope because that loyalty is the heart of the story - it is both the best and the worst trait he has, his defining feature, the thing that helps him brave the worst horrors but also drives him to his most craven actions. It is what makes him better than the worst monsters he faces, but it's also what makes him disturbingly similar to them. Epic: The Musical is a deeply respectful and loving adaptation of The Odyssey that makes all of its changes with the core of the story in mind, and also have you listened to this number with Circe?
If a woman sung that to me while holding a knife to my throat it would fix me.
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