I Can't Stop Listening to Hadestown
I thought I’d be back in just a few weeks. In February, I was in New York on business, and I considered buying a single ticket to see Hadestown one night. At the time, I didn’t know too much about the show, only that it was an adaptation of Greek mythology and had swept the Tonys last year; it seemed like something I might like. But after a long day in the office, I decided instead to grab some dinner and pass out in my hotel room.
After all, I was coming back to the city in just a few weeks, and thought I could plan a trip to the theater with friends then. You know, make it an evening.
Now more than six months later, I have not returned to New York City, and I still haven’t seen Hadestown—Broadway is shut down until at least the start of 2021—but I’ve found myself listening to the original cast recording almost every day.
It’s fitting that a show about the road to hell and back again has somehow become the soundtrack of my quarantine. The train sounds embedded in the music are pulsing, moving the listener through the story, and yet, we always end up at the same place. Me, still sitting on my couch, and Hadestown at the beginning of its cyclical tragedy.
“And that is how it ends,” Hermes (played by the inimitable André De Shields) sings, simultaneously punctuating the show’s penultimate number and my workday, “That’s how it goes.”
It’s hard not to feel stuck in this moment. Between the hundreds Americans who continue to die every day of COVID-19, the widely varying degrees of shutdown across the country, the never-ending fight for racial justice, and our current political discourse, which will undoubtedly get even more indecent in the weeks between now and the election, I find myself both unsure of what will happen next and wondering if things will be better tomorrow, if they even can be better.
But then De Shields almost whispers, “Cause here’s the thing: to know how it ends, and still begin to sing it again, as if it might turn out this time. I learned that from a friend of mine.” There is hope, he’s saying, in the trying. “Can you hear it?” De Shields booms. “Can you feel it?” And there is valor in love, even love that ends in tragedy. It's a small push to keep going, but, as the election swiftly approaches, it's also a reminder that things won't change unless we change them.
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