How Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown survived growing pains on the long road to Broadway

Open this photo in gallery:

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to Hadestown was paved, according to Anaïs Mitchell, with “coffee, wine and elbow grease.”

Hadestown is the Broadway musical that earned 14 Tony Awards nominations and won eight of them, including best musical and best original score. A touring production settles into Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre for a limited run (to Aug. 20), before moving to Ottawa, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary.

Mitchell wrote the music and lyrics for the song-told love story and cautionary tale set in a Depression-inspired world, where the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice mingles with climate-change politics and swings to countrified showtunes and rootsy jazz. What first took form as a theatrical song cycle in small-town Vermont in 2006 hit the Great White Way more than a dozen years later in a great way indeed.

“Sumptuous” and “hypnotic” and “somewhat hyperactive” were the adjectives used in a New York Times review upon Hadestown’s opening at the Walter Kerr Theatre in 2019.

Mitchell was subsequently named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2020. It was an honour out of the blue for a singer-songwriter with one musical and a collection of modestly selling albums to her credit.

“When I think of influential people I think mostly of big personalities, people who speak loudly and with authority,” Mitchell told The Globe and Mail in an e-mail interview. “I think of myself as quieter and dreamier than that. But allowing myself to dwell in the dream space of Hadestown did lead to the creation of what seems to be an influential piece of art.”

The musical’s ascension was unusual. At one point, Mitchell shelved it and rejigged it as a concept studio album that was released in 2010. In 2013, she resumed work on the stage piece, collaborating with director Rachel Chavkin. Their immersive production made its off-Broadway premiere in 2016.

A year later, a revamped, proscenium-theatre production at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton was still considered to be in need of “serious rethinks” by Globe and Mail critic J. Kelly Nestruck.

Mitchell recalled her Alberta experience. “It was a time when we were trying to scale the show up, and it was hard to figure out how to do that without losing a sense of the intimacy and immediacy we felt in our small off-Broadway, in-the-round theatre.”

In short: “There were a lot of growing pains.”

Who is she?

Born 42 years ago in rural Vermont, Mitchell is a hippies’ daughter named after writer Anaïs Nin. Mitchell’s father, Don, wrote a somewhat autobiographical novel that was adapted into Thumb Tripping, an Easy Riders knockoff starring Michael Burns, Meg Foster and Bruce Dern.

Mitchell was a teenager she when taken to New York to see her first Broadway production, Les Misérables: “I absolutely adored that show. I still do.”

She graduated from Vermont’s Middlebury College in 2004. That same year she released the album Hymns for the Exiled, which begins with the folky, politically charged Before the Eyes of Storytelling Girls. “I could tell you stories like the government tells lies,” she sings in a voice that is girlish but dead serious. “Oh, but no one listens anymore.”

Some did. Folk icon Ani DiFranco thought enough of the album that she signed Mitchell to her record label, Righteous Babes Records. In 2006, a do-it-yourself stage version of Hadestown premiered in Vermont. Mitchell sent a live audio recording of a performance to DiFranco, who was underwhelmed but intrigued.

“It was not exactly impressive,” DiFranco told The Globe. “But shining through the somewhat haphazard and cringy delivery were these songs – these indelible songs.”

For the 2010 concept album version of Hadestown, the indie-Americana material was shaped into form with the help of orchestrator-arranger Michael Chorney and producer Todd Sickafoose. On the ensemble recording with a number of guest vocalists, Mitchell sings the role of Eurydice opposite Justin Vernon’s Orpheus (a poet-musician and Eurydice’s husband).

The album was well-received critically, and while Mitchell considers it a “complete statement musically,” it is still a signpost in the musical’s evolution.

“Story-wise it left a lot to the imagination and beyond,” she said. “A lot of work was required to make Hadestown work as a generous piece of theatrical storytelling.”

Alterations in Edmonton

After a successful run in the 200-seat New York Theatre Workshop in 2016, the Chavkin-directed musical moved to Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre for upsizing and uptowning. The in-the-round presentation was scrapped for a proscenium-theatre staging and the cast was expanded.

“Edmonton is where the show grew up,” said Hadestown music director and vocal arranger Liam Robinson. “The music expanded to better tell the story.”

The Broadway-bound musical was brought for a tryout that would be as anonymous as possible under the circumstances. “Part of my pitch to them was that The New York Times was not going to come to Edmonton to review it,” said Citadel artistic director Daryl Cloran.

When the creative team behind Hadestown talk about growing pains, they’re referring to an enlargement in Edmonton that went too far. “There were moments where we realized we’d broken the show,” Robinson said. “We had to get back to the original spirit of it, which is music and poetry first.”

Broadway and beyond

After Edmonton, Hadestown moved to London’s National Theatre before it finally made its debut on Broadway to rave reviews. The most enthusiastic endorsement came from André De Shields, who originated the role of the deity Hermes in Hadestown and won a Tony for it.

Writing for Time magazine in 2020, the veteran actor said Mitchell possessed, “the aura of an oracle, the prescience of a blind poet and the skill to tease rhymes from consonants.”

De Shields’s reverence for Mitchell and the musical has not faded. “Audiences consistently return to performances of Hadestown and provide exceptional word-of-mouth, because the life lessons delineated in the show influence the quintessential element of all sentient beings, our souls,” he told The Globe.

Last year, Mitchell released a self-titled album. It is her first solo effort since the success of Hadestown, which still plays on Broadway and, in early 2024, will make its London West End premiere at the Lyric Theatre.

According to Hadestown, one’s fate can be changed by a song. A sample lyric: “A song so beautiful it brings the world back into tune.” Mitchell knows from personal experience that music can be a game changer. But bringing the world back into tune? That is some ambition.

“It’s a goal you never reach but you always keep trying, and the trying gives life meaning,” Mitchell says. “I think what we learn from Hadestown is that it’s not the winning, the attaining or the succeeding that matters. It’s the trying.”

Keep up to date with the weekly Nestruck on Theatre newsletter. Sign up today.