Attack of the Theater Kids

The Broadway show Hadestown is such a ludicrous jumble of mythological illiteracy, showbiz preening, and political fashion that it could have been transferred to “film” only by true believers.

This modern update of two ancient Greek legends — the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, plus Hades and Persephone, with Hermes thrown in as narrator and messenger — earns DIE (Diversity-Inclusion-Equity) points for composer-author Anaïs Mitchell. (Mitchell and stage director Rachel Chavkin got Tony Awards that “made history,” as media hacks like to say, for being the first such female-collaborative breakthrough.)

Giving their new mythology an imaginary New Orleans setting, Mitchell and Chavkin replace the classical European source material with American flavor. The old gods are portrayed as industrial-town denizens: Wannabe songwriter Orpheus (Reeve Carney) slings a guitar across his back; Eurydice, in blue jeans (Eva Noblezada), carries a backpack. The town’s overlord, Hades (Patrick Page), resembles Ming the Merciless, and his drunken mistress Persephone (Amber Gray) dresses like a bordello floozie. Emcee Hermes (André De Shield) struts about resembling an all-knowing Beale Street pimp and voodoo doll. All anachronisms are courtesy of Broadway’s nonsensical standard set by Hamilton, the ultimate DIE production.

After Hamilton brazenly overturned “nontraditional casting,” Broadway culture changed forever, with contemporary shows broadcasting progressive politics, in defiance of common sense and aesthetic quality. Hadestown reflects our post-Obama societal mess by mutating history before the founding of the United States to address current issues: Residents of Hadestown obsessively sing about climate change, social equity, global warming (“It ain’t right and it ain’t natural”), shared wealth, and affordability — the new sentimentalities.

Mitchell’s musical hodgepodge offers banal songs that are half-churchy, half profane (“Way down Hadestown”). Orpheus’s solo  “If It’s True” is like a Paul Simon imitation by someone who never heard Graceland or “An American Tune.” Hades seduces Persephone with “Hey Little Songbird” in a Leonard Cohen baritone. Persephone pleads with the preposterous lyric “Hades my husband, Hades my delight” (yet she’s the show’s best performance). This debacle recalls how the Broadway production Girl from the North Country made a catastrophe of Bob Dylan’s oeuvre. Since Hamilton and Taylor Swift, only pastiche remains in American cultural messaging.

Hadestown turns postmodern art into inauthenticity. Preserving a London stage performance documentary-style, as Disney did with a performance of Hamilton, rather than adopting the method of last year’s “film” of Merrily We Roll Along, director Brett Sullivan inadvertently exposes a degraded laugh-track audience. The crowd gives standing ovations to professional narcissists simply for showing up, same as politicians who amass provocative sound bites as credentials.

Performative theater kids just want attention, as do politicians thirsting for power (whether Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jasmine Crockett, or Zohran Mamdani). The Hadestown cast of narcissists makes this live “film” performance a record of showbiz at its most insufferable. (Note: De Shields carrying a Mardi Gras umbrella is a cultural travesty akin to Travis Scott as the griot introducing Nolan’s The Odyssey.)

The show’s centerpiece — “Why Do We Build the Wall” — features a chorus line of “workers” who sing and dance a quasi-MAGA chant:

Why do we build the wall?
We build the wall to keep us free . . .
How does the wall keep us free?
The wall keeps out the enemy . . .
Because we have what they have not
Because they want what we have got

In Broadway terms, it redefines greed and poverty for the Luigi Mangione cult, aiming its venom at Hades, the show’s industrialist villain and capitalist oppressor. But Mitchell’s politics are as superficial as the show’s gimmick of the hellish underworld that swallows up Eurydice. Mitchell seems ignorant of Jean Cocteau’s miraculous 1950 Orpheus, which concerned the artistic integrity of its poet protagonist (the stunning Jean Marais). What pundits call “existential crisis” diminishes the myth’s spiritual power.

In cinematic terms, Hadestown’s blend of two mythic stories is as crazy as Fritz Lang’s futuristic “hand and heart” masterpiece Metropolis but minus Lang’s genius, kineticism, and grandeur. Poor classical education shows in the Broadway cult’s acceptance of this show. That they don’t know Cocteau or Tennessee Williams’s Orpheus Descending is in keeping with the ignorant theater kids’ takeover of politics in the DSA.

Hadestown’s stylistic nightmare caters to the progressive communist ideology that prevails on Broadway, so much that this ragtag propaganda became a hit. Broadway is in worse shape than Hollywood. The combo is excruciating.