Hadestown: a Triumph of a Tragedy

Ai Xing

Last Friday, a couple of friends and I hopped on a bus headed to the Orpheum, a historic restored theater in downtown Minneapolis named for the tragic Greek figure Orpheus. Orpheus was a mythological musician who made the perilous journey into Hell to retrieve his lost love Eurydice, only to doom her again when he violates the terms of his agreement with Hades, lord of the underworld, by looking behind him to make sure she is still there. 

We were going to see “Hadestown,” a retelling of Orpheus’s story done through a Great-Depression-era jazz ensemble and powerful new characterizations of the same fated couple. First composed by singer-songwriter Anais Mitchell in 2006, “Hadestown” made its Broadway debut in 2019 and won the Tony for best musical that same year. 

From February 11 to 16, the musical showed at the Orpheum, being the second time that it has toured in Minneapolis. Bryan Munar and Megan Colton’s voices as Orpheus and Eurydice created a beautifully haunting blend that perfectly befitted the rest of this unforgettable production. The main couple’s storyline is paired with the wonderful beginnings and subsequently bleak decay of Hades’s marriage with Persephone, played by the lovely Namisa Bizana, who brings a magnetizing energy to the stage with her powerful voice and nuanced portrayal of her character. The set displays the underworld as a bleak, soul-sucking industrial hellscape, and each of the characters add their own unique brand of suffering, which culminates into a heart-wrenching experience. 

My friend and fellow audience member, Adella, has been a fan of this musical since she can remember. She put into words the thoughts that I’m sure were running through every theater-goer's heads: you know what’s going to happen, you’ve heard it a million times, and yet you still hold out hope that they are going to be okay. And then your heart just gets shattered into millions of pieces again. “Hadestown” is a wonder of modern musical theatricality and lyricism, and it is 100% worth seeing at some point in your life.