Hell comes to Philadelphia a la Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown!
When composer and lyricist Anais Mitchell’s large scale, Tony Award winning Hadestown! opened at the Academy of Music on the Kimmel Cultural Campus the other night, you could feel the palpable electricity of a sold-out crowd being together in one space, of course. For countless members of this audience, it was the first time they had been together en masse, young, old, Black, White, Brown.
But the musical, which runs until Sunday, February 20, also gave Philly audiences an intimate peek into what their doomed future might look like if they chose to go to the un-redeemed and un-redemption route, courtesy of an industrialized, folksy update of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where Orpheus goes to the underworld to rescue his lover, Eurydice, and laughs ensue.
Talking with actor Nicholas Barasch – the Orpheus in this, the first national tour of Hadestown! – the lead singer and occasional on-stage guitarist (“I’m still a beginner”) was quick to acknowledge his past times on Broadway stages (the revival of The Mystery Of Edwin Drood and She Loves Me, as well as playing Kiddo in West Side Story with director Arthur Laurents at the helm. “To be able to work with such a legendary director as Arthur Laurents, on such an array of classic songs from Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein was unforgettable,” says Barasch.
Of getting inside Anais Mitchell’s melodies to tell Hadestown!’s epic tale and embodying one of mythology’s best-known characters, Orpheus, is a task like few others. “Yeah, I definitely have to remind myself to relax and enjoy the moment. But singing songs such as ‘Wait for Me’ – I know it’s mine, but it really is my favorite moments in the production – and being able to act with this cast is pretty awesome.”
A cast that I would be remiss if I didn’t mention also holds its weight in local actors such as Bex Odorisio (Fate), who is from Ardmore, and Kimberly Marable (Persephone), who was part of the original Broadway cast and teaches a guest lecture series at Drexel University.
Ultimately, I got the feeling that Barasch was just happy to be in a living hell such as Hadestown!, and seeing audiences as opposed to lockdown and Covid. “It’s great seeing people, and being able to perform in front of bodies and faces again – masked as they might be”
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