![]() Again, maybe it’s just unfair to have to follow Amber Gray, whose Persephone is so many-layered and delicately demented. But Marable’s Persephone came across mainly as frustrated and vulgar, without much depth. Marable just didn’t make much of an impression on me, and she really must! She’s Our Lady of the Underground! It is a very difficult, strange role, no mistake. This is the only touring performance I thought was lacking. The original Persephone Amber Gray the touring, Kimberly Marable. ![]() But in any other universe, without the comparison, he would have brought the house down. The lyrics were a little indistinct sometimes, which is a shame. Morrow had a thundering voice and a commanding, sinister, predatory presence, and when he heard Orpheus’ song and it reached him, and when he reconciled with Persephone, you believed it. His voice penetrates in a way that most human voices don’t. This is the only one that I felt really just couldn’t possibly be a fair comparison. Hades is Patrick Page in the original cast, Kevyn Morrow for touring. He made me cry (not that I’m made of stone). I think Carney did more with his body to convey who he was, and Barasch did more with his voice. Barasch’s voice was bigger and more sturdy and he came across as a little less weird, but still sufficiently lost and earnest, and sufficiently otherworldly. I preferred the new guy, Nicholas Barasch, but I could go either way with this role. He was fine, but not especially memorable, and did not do much to convey that he had been around for millennia and had seen some stuff (but could still be moved). But still, that will tell you something about this actor. When nobody wanted to talk about it, I gradually surmised that it was actually Levi Kreis all the way through he had simply taken his hat off. ![]() Partly due to my very poor eyesight, my face blindness, and just my general confusion as I encounter life, I was fairly sure they had switched actors halfway through the production, and I couldn’t wait to talk about how weird it was that they did it without saying anything about it. The original Hermes was André De Shields the touring Hermes was Levi Kreis. It was very clear that Orpheus was within inches of reaching fresh air and sunshine when he stopped and turned, and Eurydice was gobbled up by the dark underworld, so it worked well (which didn’t stop the teenage girl in front of me from whisper-shouting, “Wait, wha happened?” right at that shattering moment when everyone in the theater momentarily died of grief. This arrangement, the aperture in the back, was surprisingly much more effective, and possibly done because it was bigger theater and, if they used the floor trick, the audience might see Eurydice scooting out a trap door (as I did from the balcony when they staged it this way at Walter Kerr!). The main thing I noticed was that, after Orpheus turns and Eurydice disappears away into the underworld, in this production she is swallowed up by a mouth-like aperture in the back (which also served as a train platform and other set pieces), rather than sinking down via a round platform built into the center of the stage (which is how they did it in NY). There were some minor changes to the set and the way it moved around and lit, although it was hard to put my finger on what. ![]() So you can see, it was going to be a different experience anyway. Here was our view of the stage in NYC in 2019:Īnd here was the view from our seats in Boston last weekend: ![]() That said, I couldn’t help comparing the two casts and productions in my head as we watched, so here is what I thought.įirst, we saw the original Broadway production at the Walter Kerr Theater, which is much smaller and more intimate. So it wasn’t going to be exactly the same. It’s also true that Hadestown, while a profoundly emotional work, is not emotionally manipulative, and doesn’t deliver the same experience every time anyway. Well, I had such a magnificent experience with the original cast that, when I was waiting for this show with the touring cast to begin, I was telling myself very sternly that it’s normal and right for a different cast to put their own mark on their roles. It’s many thousands of years old, for one thing and also, this is what humans do: We enter into stories that we know are tragedies, thinking maybe it will turn out different this time. This review will contain spoilers, but the whole thing of Hadestown is that we already know how the story turns out. (If you’re not familiar with the show, you might want to click through there first, which actually discusses the plot and themes.) We saw it in the summer of 2019 on Broadway and I gave it a short review here. Last weekend, we were lucky enough to see Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown for the second time - the first time for my husband and my oldest daughter and son (for whom the trip was a birthday present), and the second time for me and my third oldest daughter. ![]()
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