Review: A celebrated stage production makes the leap to screen in the fiery 'Hadestown: The Musical'

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Set us as preferred Singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell first wrote the numbers for “Hadestown,” a folk musical based on Greek mythology, in 2006.Twenty years later, the Tony-winning smash musical comes to the big screen in a version filmed on the West End in 2025, directed by Brett Sullivan.

The production reunites the original Broadway cast — André De Shields, Patrick Page, Reeve Carney, Eva Noblezada and Amber Gray — six years after the show debuted and swept the Tonys in 2019.There is a timelessness to Mitchell’s work, thanks in large part to the ancient source material, the myths of Orpheus, Eurydice, Hades and Persephone.Developed in partnership with Rachel Chavkin, who directed the Broadway show, the action is set around the 1930s in the American Deep South.

The story expresses evergreen themes of love, sacrifice, oppression, addiction and devotion, juxtaposing the tragedy of the way things are against a hope of the way they could be.There are moments when Mitchell’s songs feel eerily prescient: The show’s villain, Hades (Page), rules the underworld of Hadestown as a fascistic industrialist; his Act I closing number is titled “Why We Build the Wall.” Factory workers sing back to him, “We build the wall to keep us free,” a chorus that foretells the Trumpian rhetoric of 2016 and a reminder that these patterns of division and otherization are the eternal tools of the oppressor.“Hadestown” is a love story first and foremost, set in a joyous juke joint, the band ringing the stage.The camera follows our narrator, Hermes, played by American theater legend De Shields, as he takes the stage, kissing the heads of his company.

Entertainment & Arts “Hadestown,” Anaïs Mitchell’s Tony- and Grammy-musical reimagining the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, arrives in Los Angeles with a cast that includ...