Lyric Theatre, til September 2025

⭐⭐⭐

A conflicted, fairly begrudging 3-star review.

I’ve been having a few chats lately about subjectivity in reviewing (yeah, I’m pretty boring in person too). Reviewers, whether experienced professionals or amateurs like me, aren’t robots, but regular humans with typically human biases and personal tastes. Can a reviewer ever truly separate themselves from these preferences to provide a totally objective assessment of what they’re reviewing? My personal opinion is no – at least not entirely. While there are obviously some standard, accepted metrics of quality a reviewer can (and should) look at, they’ll always have blindspots – ingrained, socialised expectations of what ‘good’ looks like, that can’t be escaped. 

Of course, I can’t lean into this mentality too closely, because it would render the whole practice of reviewing moot – if all reviews are just opinions, the reviewer isn’t offering anything you can’t get from your friends, family, or a bloke down the pub. The argument for objective reviewing (favoured by real reviewers who know more about this than I do) is that it’s possible to set aside your personal biases by putting yourself in the mind of the intended audience and assessing a play (or book, or film) against its own ambitions.

All of this preamble is to soft-launch the naked truth that I really didn’t like Hadestown. Within the first five minutes I was put off by what I felt was its self-satisfied, smug, showy attitude to storytelling, expecting me to immediately fall in love with it like the rest of its perpetually-on-Tumblr obsessive fanbase. From there it never really recovered – I couldn’t connect to the characters and found the story profoundly boring. Though to be fair, it’s hard to effectively judge a story when you’ve decided to shut your eyes through a lot of it, because napping seems more appealing than enduring any more.

And yet, Hadestown is a very, very well-liked musical. I don’t for a second subscribe to the idea that just because something is popular means that it’s good (50 Shades of Grey, anybody?). But there’s a pretty strong case to be made that Hadestown is actually a decent musical, given the slew of awards, accolades and positive reviews it’s netted itself. All of which rather forces me to question my own distaste for Hadestown – to paraphrase Principal Skinner in the famous meme, I have to ask myself: am I so out of touch, or is it the children who are wrong? 

To try to answer this question – of whether Hadestown is actually bad, or I just hated it because I’m a grump – I’m going to try to be methodical and clinical in this review. While I like to think I always justify my opinions with some thoughtful analysis, today I’m going to more explicitly separate my reflections on different elements of the production, to see if I can come to a more objective conclusion on Hadestown. 

Character and story

Hadestown retells the Greek tragedy of star-crossed lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, with playwright and composer Anais Mitchell transplanting the story to an unspecific, Wild West-style setting. Narrator Hermes introduces us to the romantic musician Orpheus, who swiftly falls for the starving drifter Eurydice. When desperate Euridyce falls into the employ of Hades (the king of hell, here depicted as an industry kingpin overseeing a grimy manufacturing slum town), rescuing her becomes the ultimate test of Orpheus’ love. 

Look, who am I, in all my amateur reviewing wisdom, to question the resonance of one of the most retold stories of all time? But I just can’t escape the fact that neither the characters nor the narrative were particularly engaging for me. For example, I understand that in the interests of progressing with the core story, we need to just accept early on that Eurydice and Orpheus are hopelessly in love. But the way this apparently undying and desperate love is thrust onto the audience within one song, with very little characterisation of either participant beforehand (or frankly, after), made it hard for me to be invested in the rest of their story.

There were quite a few elements of the story that I felt were at best, unsatisfying, and at worse, confusing. Persephone is characterised as a sort of fallen party girl – the mistreated wife of Hades who turns to drink to deal with her suffering. And yet, we’re expected to also believe that she and Hades are each other’s great loves – a parallel from the past for Orpheus and Eurydice. From where Persephone has returned at the start of the story, and why she came back to her life of drudgery, I didn’t understand, or perhaps just missed altogether (I do think this was before I started napping). 

Hadestown occupies a sort of semi-mystical, semi-realistic world setting, in which some magical elements from the myth remain but others are transformed via real-world metaphors. The healing power of Orpheus’ music seems to be literally magical, but then Hadestown itself is not Hell but some sort of factory (or mine? I wasn’t clear). Hades’ power comes not from magic but money, as boss of the enterprise, but he is by turns also referred to as a king and a god, and his final bargain with Orpheus (a story turn I actually found reasonably compelling) really doesn’t make sense unless he is in fact some kind of mystical character. I don’t think you’re supposed to take any of this too seriously – after all, this is an adaptation of a myth, so the story is necessarily going to have the lofty, fantastical air of a fable. But I do think if you’re going to choose to retell a legend in another format, it’s fair to judge the resulting story by the conventions of the new format rather than the old. Reviewing it as a musical, I found the story of Hadestown vague, uncertain and unsatisfying. 

Music

Anais Mitchell’s music has won not just Tonys but a Grammy too, and there’s no doubt there are some bangers in this musical. The full-bodied Hadestown brings the house down, and the oft-repeated, simple seven-note melody that is central to Orpheus’ world-saving tune is genuinely beautiful. The music also deserves praise for its originality, which has a very distinct sound compared to standard musical fare. It pulls influences from folk, bluegrass, big band and jazz.

The musical appeal is helped along by an excellent band, who not only appear on stage the whole time but interact with the characters. The second act is opened by Persephone performing a real barn burner in which she introduces the musicians one by one. While I personally found this a little smug, I can understand and appreciate the creative decision – without knowing much about Greek tragedies myself, I think Hadestown overall is attempting to emulate a traditional type of storytelling in which there is direct interaction between performers and audience and an explicit acknowledgement of the shared fiction. This is made most explicit in the final number, a reflection on storytelling itself. Regardless, the audience interaction certainly went down well with the crowd, who enthusiastically cheered each performer (and each song) like they were at a rock concert. 

Performance and stagecraft

Hadestown’s style of meta-storytelling, in which the characters are at times directly engaging with the audience, is reliant on having a highly charismatic cast. The performers live up to this high bar, particularly in the case of Rachel Tucker as Persephone and the brilliant Melanie La Barrie as narrator Hermes. Hermes is a crowd favourite, and La Barrie dials it up to 11 – as soon as she walks on stage, she gets the audience laughing and cheering by cheekily showing off her sparkling costume. I personally found Hermes more cloying than charming; like most narrators, they appear exactly as often as is convenient for the narrative. But, like with some of the music choices, I can understand how the character fits in within Hadestown’s overall attempt to engage in a traditional, more fable-like style of storytelling. And it’s unquestionable that Barrie pulls off the role fantastically. There’s clearly plenty of musical talent in the rest of the cast as well, from Dylan Wood’s beautiful renditions of Orpheus’ lilting melody, to the harmonious interjections of the three muses played by Bella Brown, Allie Daniel and Francesca Daniella-Baker. There’s also some really dynamic, entertaining choreography from David Neumann that the chorus pulls off with aplomb.

Hadestown is also a great musical to watch from a staging perspective. Though the story may not give us a specific geographical or historical setting, on-stage the world of Hadestown feels clearly defined and gritty thanks to meticulous sets, props and costumes (Rachel Huack and Michael Krass). A revolving stage and centre platform that both rises up and descends into the floor are really effectively used by director Rachel Chavkin to create a sense of distance and scale within a relatively small theatre space.

Summary: hot or not?

There’s no doubt Hadestown puts on a show – there’s a great big-band sound, a brilliant cast and dynamic staging that’s fun to watch. And perhaps, if you’re a true romantic, you’ll be transported by the epic fate of Orpheus, Eurydice, Hades and Persephone. But for me, Hadestown just doesn’t quite nail the character development or narrative arc in this retelling, and those elements are too important for me to be able to rate it too highly. So I think that even in trying to be as dispassionate as I can and set aside my personal tastes, I couldn’t give this more than three stars (which to be honest, is at least one star higher than I’d rate my own enjoyment of it). 

I feel like I’ve taken an awful lot of words to say “I hated it, but I guess you might not?” Sometimes it’s fun to hate something everyone else loves; sometimes it’s just confusing to try to understand what others are seeing that you’re missing. I’d put Hadestown in the latter category for me. I’ve done my best, but I won’t be going back to see it again any time soon.