https://www.tumblr.com/playwrongs/823308199350419456/i-havent-seen-the-proshot-but-i-saw-both-the i'm not super well versed with hadestown and its versions, i've only listened to the broadway and west end versions. Could you elaborate on this i'm curious what the original production was like and your thoughts on it!
So, as a preamble: you may or may not know that Hadestown began as a very Vermont-ish project, a folk musical that had more in common with a song cycle than with a piece of plot and character-driven musical theatre. The NYTW production differed from the original concept album, but not by a lot. It was an attempt to harmonize the sweet, shaggy original with audience expectations of a professional theatre production. It wasn’t well received, because it still didn’t match those expectations very well—but I still really liked it. As a staged version of the given material, it was wonderful. The problem was that most people didn’t seem to like the material as it was, and thus began the long march of trying to hammer the thing into a shape people would accept on Broadway. I guess this was the lesson that Chavkin learned from Great Comet, and that did indeed prevent Hadestown from flopping: less beauty, less weirdness, dumber, blunter, and don’t try to respect the intelligence of a Broadway audience.
The NYTW Hadestown was staged in a sort of pit—a low, egg-shaped arena surrounded by the audience. I was seated at ground level, close enough to touch the performers, and early on was handed a battered pewter cup of champagne by the Fates for Orpheus’s toast. More audience members were seated in concentric tiers around this central arena. The seats themselves were old-fashioned dining room chairs. When the cast danced, their footsteps vibrated the floor, so that we in the audience received the physical effect of their movements.
Being much sparer and in a small space, the production had to use a lot of visual metaphor, something I’m always a fan of. Hadestown itself was represented by long metal gratings heaved out onto the floor of the playing space by actors. The hanging lights in “Wait for Me” were there already, but far more effective because they were swinging up almost into your face, as audience members.
Characterization was apparently a problem. I don’t remember that, but I wasn’t paying that much attention to it. Maybe that makes me a foolish theatregoer indeed! I was having too much fun letting the words and music wash over me in such a beautful and elegant setting. The words, by the way, got the worst of it. My go-to example is that “King of shadows/King of shades” was originally “King of diamonds/King of spades,” which suggests at once his connection to gambling and the mines. It all got dumber and more obvious. Everything had to be spelled out, because if you want to make it to Broadway, you can’t be subtle, God knows.
If I had to explain the change briefly, it’s that the NYTW version was a little avant-garde, content to let certain things be a little mysterious and weave in spare theatricality. The Broadway version says everything up front, says it over and over, spells it out so you can’t miss it. (And as good as Andre de Shields is, Hermes being a ragged drifter, a rider of the rails, makes much more dramaturgical sense than being a silver-suited charmer who…does…something, I guess? Basically just hangs around?)
Oh, that’s one more thing. The NYTW production had a cohesive, muted, Dust Bowl aesthetic—it seemed rooted in a mythologized America that still felt tangible and familiar, and that made the social commentary sharper. Broadway Hadestown is sort of New Orleans, but not for any reason springing from the text. It’s just, hey, we sing jazz, this is a jazzy city that makes for a flashier aesthetic! It isn’t a choice with as much integrity.
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