Folk musical ‘Hadestown’ comes to Toronto: It took 13 years to become the ‘generous act of dramatic storytelling’ its creators dreamed of

Developing a musical, many creators say, is like raising a child.

It’s a process that’s long, often tedious, but ultimately rewarding. Filled with years of writing, rewriting, cuts and additions, a musical is not just a project but a process, and the show that an audience sees is not merely a final product, but a snapshot of that extended journey.

American singer-songwriter and playwright Anaïs Mitchell knows that journey well. Her folk musical “Hadestown,” which begins performances in Toronto next Wednesday, took 13 years of development to end up on Broadway.

“‘Hadestown’ had one of the longest gestation periods I’ve heard of for a musical,” said Mitchell, who corresponded with the Star via email. “A lot of musical themes and lyrical ideas have held steady throughout the development of the piece, but I slowly learned that for ‘Hadestown’ to be a generous act of dramatic storytelling, I had to explode those original themes, make them work harder on behalf of exposition and character arc.”

It was a winding development process, but one that paid off. The musical, which is based on the ancient Greek myth of the two fateful lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, premiered in 2006 as a work for the stage. Mitchell then translated it into a Grammy-nominated concept album, released in 2010, before reworking it for the stage yet again.

“Hadestown,” which is, astonishingly, Mitchell’s first foray into musical theatre, eventually opened on Broadway in 2019, after runs off-Broadway, in Edmonton and at London’s National Theatre. It received a leading 14 Tony Award nomination that season, winning eight, including Best Musical and Best Original Score for Mitchell.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever worked on a show that was so actively still becoming itself in front of audiences,” said director Rachel Chavkin, who also earned a Tony for her work on the musical. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever directed because it’s such a delicate piece.”

Chavkin began collaborating with Mitchell on the musical in 2013. Mitchell, at the time, was looking to rework the concept album back into a stage musical and was introduced to Chavkin by a mutual friend.

The director, who listened to the 2010 album, said she was blown away by the music. “The lyrics and the poetry is just out of this world: beautiful in terms of how she layers images and how they can be both lyrical and deeply political,” Chavkin said of Mitchell’s work.

The two women worked together for six years to bring the musical to Broadway. But it was perhaps the show’s pre-Broadway stop in Edmonton, Chavkin said, that was most instrumental to the musical’s development process.

“I would say Canada was the site of our hardest and biggest lessons about the show,” she noted.

That production at Edmonton’s Citadel Theatre came fresh off “Hadestown’s” off-Broadway run. Working with a larger budget, Chavkin and her team were looking to expand their vision for the show and translate it from an in-the-round staging to a more standard proscenium-style production for Broadway. But their initial approach, Chavkin said, “ultimately felt very wrong.”

At first, Chavkin and her production designers began to interpret the musical literally. They visualized details mentioned in the lyrics, including the railroad track leading to Hadestown highlighted in the opening number. (“Once upon a time there was a railroad line,” sings Hermes, the narrator.)

“It was a very beautiful set, but it felt very cold,” said Chavkin. “In tech, I was sort of freaking out. We’d gotten overly literal in a way that actually hurt the poetry.”

So it was there in Edmonton that she and her team had an epiphany that shaped “Hadestown” into the beguiling and warmer visual palette that it maintains today.

“Between the first preview and second preview performance in Edmonton, in consort very much with our set designer Rachel Hauck, we actually cut three-quarters of the Act 1 set,” recalled Chavkin. “And suddenly the play came roaring back to life.”

Throughout the development process, Mitchell had no idea where the piece was going nor where it would end up. “It’s a miracle we got it to a place where it could be enjoyed by so many people in different cities and countries,” she said, adding that the process of discovering her writing was one of the most rewarding aspects of the journey.

Describing that creation process, Mitchell said she didn’t write the musical chronologically. Rather, it was a “question of triage.”

“For me, melodies are a natural thing, they drop from the sky,” she said. “Lyrics occasionally drop from the sky, but most often I have to wrestle them down and mainly I have to wait, and wait, and wait for the ‘right’ words to appear.”

After spending more than a decade of her life on “Hadestown,” Mitchell has returned to recording and performing under her own name, along with her folk-rock band Bonny Light Horseman.

But musical theatre writing will never be too far away for her: “I’d love to write another musical, or collaborate on one, if the right project came along,” she said. “It’s too cool a form to only do it once!”

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