[V]ermont-born singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell’s musical “Hadestown” is a modern take on the Greek myth of Orpheus and his legendary travels to the underworld. But how the folk opera that also features cabaret, choral pop, jazz and swing made its way from her home state to Broadway is an epic story in itself.
The show began as what the New Haven native calls a “do-it-yourself community theater project” that begat an album, then productions at the New York Theatre Workshop and in Canada and England before opening on the Great White Way, which is set to recognize it Sunday with a season-high 14 Tony Award nominations.
“I feel so proud to be embraced by that whole world with a piece that comes from the wild woods and not from a boardroom,” Mitchell recently told Variety about a show that’s now grossing $1 million a week. “It feels like a win for people who are taking the unconventional path with their art.”
That road began at Addison County’s Treleven sheep farm, where the 38-year-old Brooklyn-based musician grew up listening to her parents Don and Cheryl Mitchell spin records by everyone from Bob Dylan to Steely Dan when not introducing her to D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths or watching her perform in the annual “Night Fires” winter solstice pageant.
“We raised our kids without television,” her father explains of the aforementioned mix.
Enrolling at Middlebury College, Mitchell self-recorded and released her first album, “The Song They Sang … When Rome Fell,” before graduating as a political science major in 2004. Soon after, she was questioning the re-election of President George W. Bush — “me being an idealistic activist kid coming out of school, and then hitting the reality of the world and seeing this guy getting elected again,” she tells Rolling Stone — when a lyric popped into her head that sparked the first song for “Hadestown.”
Receiving seed money from the Vermont Arts Council and Vermont Community Foundation, Mitchell joined with a local cast and crew headed by Lincoln orchestrator Michael Chorney and Montpelier director and designer Ben Matchstick to debut the song cycle at Barre’s Old Labor Hall in 2006. That led to a series of performances throughout the state, which led to a 2010 concept album released by Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records, which led to a series of performances throughout the country.
Mitchell then met avant-garde director Rachel Chavkin, who helped her expand the show for runs at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2016, Edmonton, Canada’s Citadel Theatre in 2017, London’s Royal National Theatre in 2018 and Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre this spring.
“All your favorite Greeks are heading somewhere in ‘Hadestown,’ the sumptuous, hypnotic and somewhat hyperactive musical,” the New York Times began its recent review.
In Mitchell’s radical reworking of the myth, the characters inhabit a Depression-era New Orleans jazz joint that leads to the furnace room of an underground factory, Hadestown.
“The lyrics, loaded with metaphors and aphorisms, fire off honest observations about art versus commerce, pragmatism versus idealism, and the struggle to love amid jealousy and doubt,” the Los Angeles Times writes. “While also touching on climate change and labor unionizing, ‘Hadestown’ most movingly reframes the Greek tragedy as a tale of hope: Even after repeated failure, the human inclination is to get up and try again.”
The 2½-hour show reaped coast-to-coast coverage this week when the Associated Press reported on whether the Act 1 finale song “Why We Build the Wall” is a poke at President Donald Trump.
No, answered Mitchell, who wrote the lyrics almost 15 years ago.
“I realized that if you’re dealing with mythic archetypes, those things are going to come around again and again, for better or worse,” she said in the AP story. “I’m so grateful for the ways in which this story, as ancient as it is, has kept unfolding.”
So are her parents, who have invited a few of their daughter’s teachers and mentors to join them in watching CBS’ live Tony Awards broadcast Sunday from 8 to 11 p.m.
“After I retired, I was allowed to get a TV,” her father explains.
Vermonters will see if Mitchell can follow in the footsteps of fellow Tony best musical creators Cyndi Lauper, the former Johnson State College student turned pop star who penned 2013’s “Kinky Boots,” and Alison Bechdel, the state cartoonist laureate whose life inspired 2015’s “Fun Home.”
“We rarely have used the words ‘we’re proud of her’ because it’s Anaïs’ moment and Anaïs’ show,” says Don Mitchell, who has seen every version from Barre to Broadway. “Instead, we recognize she has a gift and we didn’t mess it up.”
