Way Down Hadestown

Underground musical turned Broadway hit stages Dallas residency in 2022

The award-winning musical makes a tour stop in Dallas January 18-30, 2022.

Photo by T Charles Erickson

In 2022, Dallas audiences will get to experience Hadestown, the Tony Award-winning musical based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth that has a New Orleans tinge to its score. It's playing at the Winspear Opera House through Dallas Summer Musicals from January 18-30.

The unique musical is praised for its freshness — blending folk traditions, pop approachability, and Broadway flair — and its unabated joy. It’s a triumph for, ultimately, an ancient tragedy exploring faithfulness despite destitution.

“Hope is definitely one of the most important themes,” says Nicholas Barasch, who plays Orpheus on the national tour. “The beautiful thing about the musical is that it’s, through song, a metaphor for hope and a metaphor for love. Everyone knows the score is exquisite, and I think that people are going to be taken by the story and the spirit. Hopefully [they] will leave feeling more hopeful and having faith.”

The story follows Orpheus, the lyre player whose performance influences the natural world, and Eurydice, his wife, who gets tangled in underworld affairs. In parallel, King of the Underworld Hades and his wife, Persephone — who begrudgingly travels back and forth between realms of the living and the dead — gain yet another layer of nuance in their already famously complicated union.

In Hadestown, Orpheus rides a delicate line between persistent optimism and naiveté. (His first-ever words to Eurydice before “Wedding Song” are, sweetly, “Come home with me.”)

Reeve Carney plays the mythological musician on Broadway with a nervousness that is at once self-conscious and unflinching. Barasch speaks of his Orpheus as distinct, but not completely different from Carney’s.

“Rachel Chavkin, our amazing director, has been really open to our individual ideas as performers, but she also is maintaining the integrity of the show,” Barasch says. “I felt excited as a fan just being in the show and knowing that it will maintain all of its glory of the Broadway version.”

According to Barasch, aside from the cast and some set changes, both the brass tacks and the spirit of the show remain unchanged. The traveling production is not small-scale by any means; 17 actors and 16 crew are taking six trucks cross-country to more than 35 cities. Each show includes 32 songs accompanied by seven instrumentalists.

It’s the manifestation of a dream that took songwriter Anaïs Mitchell 16 years to develop, from concept album (featuring Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and folk hero Ani DiFranco) to Broadway stage.

Behind-the-scenes conversations around Hadestown nearly always include some mention of performers being fans first and foremost, not sparing Hades actor Patrick Page (of the Broadway version) or mandolin virtuoso and radio personality Chris Thile. Barasch had a similar experience. He auditioned for the touring version in 2019, before any talk of a pandemic, and found his plans shunted years into an uncertain future.

“The day after Broadway shut down was my final callback,” recalls Barasch. “I got the role when I was 21 and now I’m 23, and I think a lot of life has happened in between. I’ve been so looking forward to this for a long time. ... As a performer, we need to live in order to express that onstage.”

Thankfully for Barasch and other actors on hold, Hadestown is both upbeat and evergreen. Like the myths made to contain timeless truths, the musical, while modernizing the style in which they’re told, continues the tradition of being just specific enough.

At NPR’s Tiny Desk, Mitchell announced the Broadway cast’s rendition of “Why We Build the Wall” by specifying it was written in 2006, long before that other wall was the one on everyone’s minds. The content of the song — rationale for creating busywork to develop a cult of worker identities — has been in many headlines as workforces have gone through change after change in the past couple years.

Thematic relevance aside, the score is endlessly impactful in a way only something that draws so heavily from folk traditions can be. “Livin’ it Up on Top” goes from spiritual to celebratory call-and-response to dance breakdown, and could easily sneak into a road trip playlist, even if your passenger isn’t explicitly into musical theater.

With a lyre player as its lead and a magical song anchoring the plot, this show takes a meta approach to music that infrequent theatergoers may find more tangible than most.

“One of the joys of being an actor is getting to use different tools in your tool set for each job. ... It feels like I’m the lead guitarist of the band all of a sudden, and I don’t know how that happened,” says Barasch of his unique position playing a player. “I feel so supported as an actor in the show, but also as a musician. It feels pretty exhilarating to be front and center for some of these numbers.”

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'Hadestown' plays at the Winspear Opera House, January 18-30. Tickets at dallassummermusicals.org.

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A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

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