Starting October 3, the critically acclaimed musical Hadestown is returning to the Ahmanson Theatre in LA. It will run for 16 performances until October 15.
Hadestown is an epic retelling of two tragic love stories in Greek mythology: Orpheus and Eurydice, plus Hades and Persephone. The show is narrated by Hermes, another Greek god, and follows Orpheus on his quest to rescue Eurydice after she signs a contract with Hades to work for him underground.
But long before Hadestown won eight Tony awards in 2019, it was originally a folk opera concept album written by indie singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell. She also performed it for a limited run in Vermont, but wanted to create something bigger. So in 2011, one of Mitchell’s agents sent it to Dale Franzen, who was the director of the BroadStage in Santa Monica.
“I listened to the first eight bars, and within eight bars, I thought, ‘Whoa, something very different is happening here.’ So I closed my door, I listened to the whole album, I listened to it again. … And by the end of about the third time, I called her [agent] up and said, ‘Send me eight albums,’” Franzen recalls.
She realized the potential for Hadestown to become a full production. Franzen used to be an opera singer, so she was familiar with the myth of Orpheus through productions like Orpheo and Orpheus in the Underworld. So she sent these albums to producers and friends that she trusted, including Mara Isaacs, the founder of Octopus Theatricals, a theater production and consulting company.
Isaacs fell in love with Hadestown immediately. “I had one of those … classic driveway moments where I popped it into the CD player in my car, got to my destination, and then sat for half an hour because I couldn't stop listening to it,” she says. “You could … see it three-dimensionally while you were listening to the music. And I knew instantly it was something very special and that I had to be a part of it.”
For both Franzen and Isaacs, bringing Hadestown to Broadway wasn’t their end goal. “We started the journey because we thought this was an unusual and extraordinary piece of musical theater that we wanted to nurture into the best show we could,” Franzen says.
Like Franzen, Isaacs started her theater production career in Los Angeles as an associate producer at the Mark Taper Forum and Center Theatre Group. Drawing from their experience in the Angeleno theater scene, Franzen and Isaacs developed many iterations of Hadestown — from its beginnings at the New York Theater Workshop, to its acclaimed off-Broadway run in Canada — before it reached Broadway in 2019.
“One of the reasons that I feel so lucky to be in a partnership with [Mara] is that no matter how crazy an idea I come up with, or she comes up with, we're always willing to try it. And that's very unusual … in the commercial world,” Franzen says.
Isaacs adds, “We were developing a show that was unlike any show that had preceded it. So there wasn't a roadmap, and we had to figure it out in a different way. And we had to figure out how to communicate what this piece was because it didn't fit neatly into any existing box. So you could call it a challenge … or you could call it our greatest strength.”
It was hard for Franzen and Isaacs to pick their favorite song in Hadestown, but some of the tracks they highlighted include:
- Epic III – “When Orpheus is finally standing up to Hades and telling him his truth … [it] is just beautiful poetry about reaching into somebody's dark heart and actually finding the goodness and the possibility of redemption,” Isaacs says.
- If It’s True – “There’s a song which no one ever talks about … when Orpheus has been confronted by the fact that Eurydice has … sold her soul to be in Hadestown. … He begins to understand his place … as an agent of change, and rallying the other … workers in the chorus and Hadestown … to see that maybe there's another way,” Isaacs says.
- Wait for Me – “There's … what I called the Broadway legendary moment … where the entire stage transforms, the lighting transforms, the music transforms, and it's just like this amazing moment that usually … the audience … just goes bonkers every time they see it,” Franzen says.