That’s the power of music, right? Orpheus could make stones sing. What’s fascinating about this production, with its dark, gloomy sets and shimmering songs about poverty and threats to human community, is that these ancient mythic characters with their wayward passions and swollen egos leave us feeling jazzed up and happy. “We’re gonna sing it again and again,” he says at the end of the show, when we see that this sad song-story somehow brings hope for a different ending every time it’s told. Our narrator is Hermes, played by svelte, silver-suited Levi Kreis, a charismatic hipster stealing scenes with a wise smile and a dancer’s grace. “That’s how dead people look,” we’re told. A train whistle and blast of headlights signals we’ve arrived in Hades, a kind of burned-out rust-belt city where sweating bodies toil, heads down. The singer’s beloved Eurydice (a plucky, full-throated Morgan Siobhan Green) is a skeptical runaway in a tough town. Here, Orpheus (a high-hearted Nicholas Barasch, delivering “Come Home with Me” in a fine falsetto voice) is a young songwriter working in a 30’s New Orleans-style nightclub, with an eight-member orchestra circling on Rachel Hauck’s set design, a revolving stage heavy with smoke made even moodier by Bradley King’s stunning light design. Our King of the Underworld only offers that fateful test, in Mitchell’s telling, because Hades’ alluring bride Persephone (vibrant mezzo Kimberly Marable, drawing audience shout-outs), goddess of the seasons who leaves for the upper world in spring and summer, pleads the lovers’ case and seduces her husband into giving them a chance.
He can leave with his bride, but only if he walks in front, and never looks back to see if she’s there. He travels to the Underworld where Hades, the god of dead folk, offers him a deal. Orpheus, the greatest musician ever, marries Eurydice, who dies from a snake bite on their wedding day. Mitchell’s oratorio is based on a famous Greek myth about love and doubt. We want everybody to just keep on rocking and singing and not look back. Costume designer Michael Krass conjures an era both classic and contemporary with his beautiful, clingy female outfits. The North American touring production is directed with flash and precision by Rachel Chavkin and features David Neumann’s ominous and sexy choreography. From the opening “Road to Hell” to the closing reprise, Anais Mitchell’s rapturous, haunting folk opera generates the kind of aw right! heat rising from a well-grooved cast and a red-hot band. Smack on top of our bone-chilling January freeze, Dallas Summer Musicals brings the Tony-winning Hadestown to the Winspear Opera House.
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