HADESTOWN - A Funky and Brilliant Opening to the B'way Season

 At long last, East Lansing’s Wharton Center’s Broadway series finally opened on Tuesday night. Everyone in attendance was eagerly looking around to see how big the house was, understanding that Michigan’s Covid numbers are stubbornly high. Well, it looks like folks have a great need to have their spirits lifted with singing and dancing and good stories.

“Hadestown,” the Tony award winning spectacle, filled about 1100 seats (out of 2500) at the Cobb Great Hall – about normal for Covid times.

Although many people didn’t know what to expect from this oddly named musical, the 13-member cast dispelled all apprehensions at the very beginning. They entered the stage as a group, smiling and waving to the audience enthusiastically. And the audience smiled and laughed back. I saw the 4^th wall crumbling.

“Hadestown” is an upbeat and inspirational show based on Greek mythology but is told with so much flare and creativity that everyone will get it easily.

The brilliant writer (music, lyrics AND book), Anais Mitchell, chose to use New Orleans jazz to tell the story. And it did have a Mardi Gras feel, as well. The costumes were funky and the stage movements were quirky and fun.

But more than anything, the mostly young cast seemed to be having a blast telling us this mythical tale of the naïve/poet Orpheus, his fiancée Eurydice, the rich and evil Hades, his wife Persephone, the dapper Hermes who acts as the storyteller and the three Fates.

The music is rollicking (mostly acoustic)and very accessible. The on-stage band features, of all things, a jazz trombone played by Audrey Ochoa. She plays lots of hard-charging solos and even joins the cast with some dancing while playing her horn. 

When the band took their seats after intermission, the trombonist received an ovation – maybe a first.

The story is loose and fairy tale-like, but we are drawn in by the love story. The tough girl Eurydice (Morgan Siobhan Green) is immediately proposed to by boyishly charming Orpheus (Nicholas Barasch). But there is darkness too - after all the show’s name is Hadestown. It’s all about the struggle between cynicism and idealism – two sides of the same coin.

The voices in this top-drawer cast are uniformly excellent, but Barasch gets the highest marks.  He sings many ballads, using his very high tenor range and they are all compelling. Barasch comes to the show from doing a star turn in a recent revival of “She Loves Me” on Broadway. The Barasch/Green couple is sweet and captures the audience.

Other standouts are Kimberly Marable (direct from the Broadway cast) and Kevyn Morrow, a Broadway veteran whose bass voice makes the rafters shake.

Leading us through the proceedings is Hermes (Levi Kreis) with a smashing R&B voice and great dance moves.

Watching the creativity of this show reminded me of the vast variety of styles Broadway musicals offer. Every show seems to be totally unique and searching for new ways of crafting the theatrical exsperience.

And with “Hadestown,” I felt that it was as current as TODAY. The music, the messages, the diversity, the style, and the dancing all speak eloquently about what is going on in current culture.  Why, one character even had a song about building a wall.

In this production the imaginative directing by Rachel Chavkin was just as important to the show’s success as the words and music. There was movement and motion happing throughout every minute of the show, never letting the audience loose concentration.

“Hadestown,” winner of eight Tony Awards, runs through December 12. Whartoncenter.com for tickets.