Hadestown: The Musical

The Song That Turns Around: Hadestown and the Orphic Refusal

The new film of Hadestown is a live theater capture of the musical, featuring the five original principals of the Broadway company, which opened in limited release this summer through Bleecker Street. That makes it, on paper, the most respectable kind of commodity: a prestige artifact of a Tony-winning show, preserved and redistributed for anyone who never got a seat at the Walter Kerr. The odd thing is how strongly the work fights the conditions of its own circulation. Anaïs Mitchell’s folk opera is, at its core, an argument about what happens to song under a regime of work. The camera, which goes in close where the theater kept its distance, makes that argument sharper.

The right place to start is a book Mitchell may never have read. In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse proposed that Western culture had chosen the wrong hero. Prometheus, who steals fire and suffers for it, is the patron saint of what Marcuse called the performance principle: the organization of life around productivity, deferral, and toil, with desire rationed and pleasure postponed to a weekend that never quite arrives. Against him Marcuse set Orpheus and Narcissus, figures of a different relation to the world. Their song does not master nature but reconciles with it. Their Eros is not a reward for labor but the end of labor’s tyranny. For Marcuse, Orpheus was the image of the Great Refusal, the refusal to accept that repression is simply the price of civilization.

Hadestown builds an entire theatrical cosmology on that opposition, and it does so with real intelligence. Hades, played by Patrick Page with a bass voice like a coal seam, is Prometheus gone corporate. He has fire, and he has turned it into industry: a mining town underground where workers trade memory for wages and security for forgetting. Orpheus is the penniless songwriter who believes, almost embarrassingly, that a song could bring back spring. The show never mistakes the two for equals. Hades owns everything. Orpheus owns a tune he hasn’t finished.

The happy consciousness, way down

What makes Hadestown more than an allegory with good tunes is that it understands how the performance principle wins. Eurydice is not seduced. She is hungry. Eva Noblezada plays her as someone who has already done the math on romance and found it doesn’t pay for a coat. When she takes Hades’s ticket down, it isn’t a moral failure. It’s the rational choice in a world where the weather has gone wrong and the bread has run out. Marcuse’s most unsettling claim in One-Dimensional Man was that advanced industrial society doesn’t need to crush its subjects. It satisfies them, or satisfies enough of their needs that the needs it doesn’t satisfy stop being thinkable. The workers of Hadestown are not in chains. They have jobs, and they have a story about why the jobs are good.

That story is “Why We Build the Wall,” the show’s most famous number and still its most chilling. Written years before it became an accidental headline, it works as a catechism: Hades asks the questions, the workers chant the answers, and every answer loops back to protect the premise. The wall keeps out poverty; poverty is the enemy because it wants what we have; we have work because we have the wall. This is what Marcuse meant by the closing of the universe of discourse. The language itself is built so that no question leads outside it. In the capture, the camera finds the workers’ faces mid-chant, and the effect is less menace than contentment, which is worse.

Here Wendy Brown sharpens the point in a way Marcuse couldn’t have. In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Brown argued that the global boom in wall-building marks not the strength of the state but its weakening. Walls are theater. They stage a sovereignty that is actually slipping away, offering the image of protection to populations whose real insecurity comes from forces no wall can stop. Mitchell’s Hades fits this diagnosis precisely. He is not an omnipotent tyrant; he is an anxious one. His marriage is failing, his wife spends her half-year aboveground drinking to forget him, and his empire is a compensation for a love he no longer knows how to hold. The wall is less a defense than a monument to his fear. Page plays the contradiction beautifully: the voice is granite, but the eyes keep checking whether anyone still believes him.

Where the show’s politics stop

Brown also exposes the show’s most significant limit. Mitchell’s underworld is a company town out of the 1930s, with wages, a boss, a whistle, and a foreman’s ledger. It’s a Fordist nightmare, and its legibility is part of its power. You know who the villain is because he wears pinstripes and owns the mine. But the forms of domination Brown spent her later career analyzing work differently. Neoliberal rationality, in her account, doesn’t need a boss in a tower; it turns every person into a small enterprise managing their own human capital, responsible for their own failure. There’s a slightly nostalgic comfort in Hadestown’s villain. He is a figure from a world where at least you could find the guy in charge.

Yet the show has one move that is pure Brown, and it’s the hinge of the whole tragedy. After Orpheus’s song moves the workers to lift their heads, a genuine political event and the one moment the underworld’s discourse cracks, Hades doesn’t crush the uprising. He individualizes it. Orpheus may leave with Eurydice, on one condition: he must walk ahead and never look back. With that clause, a collective awakening becomes a private test of character. Freedom is no longer something the workers might seize together; it’s something one young man might earn alone, through personal faith, and lose through personal weakness. Brown calls this responsibilization: the conversion of a structural problem into an individual’s burden. The workers, notably, vanish from the drama the moment the deal is struck. Hades has solved his labor problem by turning it into a love story.

Marcuse would see the trap at once. The real antagonist in the final act is not Hades but doubt, and the Fates’ “Doubt Comes In” is the show’s quiet masterpiece. Three women circle Orpheus on the road and whisper the reality principle into his ear: who are you to think you could win, why would the powerful let you go, isn’t it more likely this is a trick? The guard has been internalized. No one needs to stop Orpheus; he stops himself. This is the one-dimensional society’s crowning achievement, a world in which the voice of domination sounds like common sense and even, cruelly, like care.

Form against the world

If that were the whole story, Hadestown would be a beautifully staged counsel of despair. But Marcuse’s late work, The Aesthetic Dimension, insisted that art’s political truth doesn’t live in its message. It lives in its form, in the way the work estranges us from the given world and lets us glimpse another. The tragic ending doesn’t refute the Orphic dream. It indicts the reality that makes the dream unfulfillable.

The production understands this at the level of craft. Rachel Hauck’s set, with its concentric revolves, turns the road out of hell into a treadmill, the performance principle made literal. Bradley King’s swinging lamps in “Wait for Me” make light itself feel like labor, something hauled and swung by hand. The New Orleans brass and Appalachian folk give the score a texture that belongs to no market moment. It sounds like music made by people for people, before music was product. And André De Shields as Hermes, the narrator who keeps reminding us that this is an old song, holds the whole thing in a frame that refuses illusion. We know how it ends. The show knows we know. That knowledge is the estrangement.

Still, Marcuse’s earlier and more suspicious essay, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” hovers over the final scene. There he argued that bourgeois art soothes by relocating freedom into the soul. You get catharsis instead of change, beauty in the theater and the same world outside. When Persephone raises her cup in the closing moments, offering a toast to Orpheus and to everyone who has lost, the moment is gorgeous and genuinely moving. It is also exactly the kind of consolation Marcuse warned about: grief made bearable, then dismissed with the house lights. The capture adds a sharper irony. This is an anti-capitalist hymn, sold first at Broadway prices and now at the multiplex, with the original cast reassembled as a premium product. Marcuse called the system’s ability to absorb its own negation repressive desublimation, and Hadestown’s commercial life is a textbook case.

The disappointable hope

This is where Ernst Bloch offers what Marcuse’s suspicion can’t. For Bloch, art’s utopian content is not a consolation but an anticipatory illumination, a glimpse of the Not-Yet, a world that doesn’t exist but that the present carries within it like a seed. Crucially, Bloch insisted that real hope must be disappointable. Hope that cannot fail is mere optimism, ideology in a party hat. Educated hope knows it can be defeated and hopes anyway, because the possibility it points to is real even when the outcome is not.

That is the precise emotional logic of Hadestown’s ending. Hermes tells us the story will be sung again, and again, in the hope that this time it might end differently. It’s not a promise. Orpheus will turn around next time too. But the act of singing it again is itself a refusal: a refusal to accept the given ending as the final word. Bloch would recognize this not as affirmative culture but as its opposite, the stubborn rehearsal of a possibility history has not yet allowed. Persephone’s cup is raised not to the world as it is but to a spring that hasn’t come.

The disagreement between Marcuse’s two minds, art as consolation and art as indictment, isn’t something Hadestown resolves, and it’s to the show’s credit that it doesn’t pretend to. The capture is especially good at holding the tension. Close-ups make the tragedy more intimate, but they also make the ensemble’s collective presence harder to feel; the workers become background to a love story, which is precisely the narrowing Hades engineered. Something is lost when the audience’s shared breath becomes a camera’s chosen angle. Something is gained, too: Reeve Carney’s face in the moment before the turn, a man realizing that the voice of doubt is his own, is unbearable in a way no balcony seat could deliver.

Hadestown is a rich, intelligent, and deeply felt work that knows more about power than most political theater and sings it better. Its limits are real. Its villain belongs to an older economy than ours, and its revolution dissolves too easily back into romance. But its central insight is Marcuse’s, rendered in brass and lamplight. The most effective regime isn’t the one that stops you at the gate. It’s the one that walks behind you on the road out, whispering that you were foolish to believe. Against that whisper, the show offers nothing so naive as victory. It offers a song that knows it will fail and insists on being sung again. In a culture organized to make the alternative unthinkable, that is no small thing.