By Lyrica Gee
The national tour of Tony and Grammy award-winning musical Hadestown came through Miller Auditorium in an inventive take on the Greek mythological retelling. The show stayed in town for two days, April 1 and 2, selling out the theater both nights in an outpouring of love for the stage production.
I have been a fan of the musical for a long time, starting my journey with the 2017 live off-Broadway cast recording. My first time listening to the tracks, I was a freshman in high school and was immediately stricken by the instrumentation of the musical. The strong horns, reminiscent of New Orleans sound, were so unlike what I thought musical theater had to sound like. When I graduated from high school, my mom and I decided to forgo a grad party and instead take a trip to New York to see it performed by the original Broadway cast. Since then, I have also seen it during my study abroad experience in London with the West End cast.
This time around, I attended the show’s first night on the local stage and was blown away by every detail. In particular, the four leads – Megan Colton as Eurydice, Jose Contreras as Orpheus, Nickolaus Colón as Hades, and Namisa Mdlalose Bizana as Persephone – took unique approaches to characters which have been so familiar to me over the .
All to say, I have a long-standing devotion to this show and was excited to see how my perspective would shift seeing it on a smaller scale without the tricked-out stages I had seen in New York and London. The Zhang Broadway in West Michigan production team did an incredible job staying true to the importance of the stage’s cyclical movement in the show while adapting it for Miller Auditorium’s compact stage.
This was accomplished through the use of meticulous lighting cues which helped the viewer differentiate between settings. Split between the railroad station in the “aboveground” and Hadestown, a part of the Underworld, the show normally relies on the stage’s ability to descend and ascend its actors to communicate the switch. However, this show managed to do the same with bright orange lighting signifying the unnatural, overproduced nature of Hadestown and cooler blues and pale yellows to indicate the aboveground.
Hadestown is an inherently political musical whose allegory only becomes more relevant with time. This lighting is the first step to portraying the stark environmental changes that both settings have been put through as a result of Hades’ greed.
The Hades actor embodies a corporate bigwig who victimizes the mortals then plays savior to the same population. Nickolaus Colón’s performance of “Why We Build the Wall” carries a businessman to the chilling rhetoric of capitalism’s cyclical weaponization of the poor working man. His performance effectively transforms into an impression of real-world demagogues and their perverse jumps in logic.
As his foil character, Orpheus is the idealistic musician who shows the characters of the show what the world could look like. Jose Contreras achieves the beautiful high tenor range in perfect contrast with Colón’s deep bass notes, emphasizing this dichotomy of their characters’ worldviews.
Contreras’ “Wait For Me” received a well-deserved extended ovation. His Orpheus is soulful, a pleasantly surprising quality which contrasts the geeky, longing intererpretations I have previously seen.
Namisa Mdlalose Bizana adds a much-needed wittiness to the stage as Persephone. Her vocal performance walks the line between the profound ache and fall-off-your-ass drunk sides of Persephone’s coin with ease. Her dancing brings the liveliness and warmth of the summer throughout the first half of the show.
Finally, Hadestown is nothing without a phenomenal Eurydice, which this production had in spades. Megan Colton achieves a scrappy take on the character; each beat hit with power behind her voice and a unique physical performance that made her one of my favorite Eurydices to date. Her performance drew my eye from start to finish. Her interpretation of “Flowers” brought a tear to my eye and was my favorite moment of the night.
The brilliance of these four in conversation is their shared physical comedy amidst the tragic nature of the play. The crowd was so engaged with the comedic beats, which were so on point that even Colón’s Hades to briefly break into genuine laughter towards the end of the show.
With the energy of the band’s position in the wings of the stage setting, the crowd gave a raucous final ovation for the performers, dancers, and musicians. I cannot overstate how brilliant this production of my favorite musical was, with every detail on point from start to finish, making it as enjoyable on Miller’s stage as it was on Broadway.
On the way out of Miller Auditorium, I heard passersby geeking out over the idea of stage managing a small production of the show. This reminded me why bringing these modern, rising classics to local theater is so important: to inspire the small city theater kids who aspire to create impactful art akin to the brilliant, award-winning Hadestown.
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