Talking Hadestown (Warner Music Group’s Arts Music and Sing It Again Records).
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
Construction, rehearsal, invention and improvement are at the heart of Hadestown. It’s a show that must be more than the sum of its parts because those parts are seemingly so discordant and haphazardly lashed to one another: a post-apocalyptic New Orleans Greek Myths Musical doesn’t scream easy commercial hit. And, indeed, earlier versions of the show didn’t quite land (so much scrutiny was aimed at the latest West End staging precisely because the National Theatre production years prior was still a little underbaked). These two London shows are only a relatively small part of a long lineage of different versions of Hadestown, many of which Anaïs Mitchell (music, lyrics, book) references in her commentaries on Talking Hadestown.
Much like the show itself, Talking Hadestown is a strange proposition: an abridged version of the OBC recording, with Mitchell’s commentary interspersed throughout. It’s not a common thing to do, but Hadestown’s rich production history certainly provides a mine of potential alternatives with which to compare the tracks you listen to throughout the album, as well as Mitchell’s anecdotes and memories.
So fertile is this ground that Mitchell published Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown in 2020, which contained the whole libretto, paired with Mitchell’s intensely detailed annotations and fully formed alternate verses – I can’t recommend the book strongly enough.
Perhaps, though, Working sets Talking up as a bit of a disappointment. While there are flashes of proper interest or excitement – most notably when Mitchell adds texture by singing the alternates she remembers – the whole thing seems a bit light weight. The recorded commentary feels a lot like leftover audio from the talking heads section of a larger documentary; every time Mitchell references a moment of staging, or talks about an earlier recording, I’m poised to see a pro-shot moment, or old shaky camera footage, or hear a few bars from a different album, at the very least.
Hadestown is special because it exploits its form so comprehensively, but Talking Hadestown seems actively to avoid making the most of being an album. One wouldn’t expect the kind of detail in Working on a Song – it would be incredibly annoying to have an audio footnote every second line – but a book can’t convey the music of the alternate verses it sets out, nor the freely creative passion of the author; Talking Hadestown could, but seems largely to choose not to do these things. Admittedly, hearing rather than reading her thoughts is by no means nothing, but I was left with a sense of wasted opportunity, of a project as yet unrefined.
It comes down to a question of audience. Presumably, this is aimed at Hadestown die-hards, who know the show well enough to want to listen to a broken-up, talked-over version of the recording. That said, a lot of the detail Mitchell gives is about staging, which fans who have seen the show on Broadway, tour, or in the West End (or by unspecified other means on the internet…) will already have in mind.
Dramaturgy nerds more generally might find some insights, but the Working on a Song book is clearly the superior resource for study. Maybe, like the repeating Epic, or the show itself, the team behind Talking Hadestown will continue to innovate and rehearse their piece, and we’ll see a magical, finished version down the line. Until then, as Orpheus says: ‘It isn’t finished yet.’
Tom Martland
- This release marks the fifth anniversary of the show’s Original Broadway Cast Album.
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