Synopsis: The tragic love of Orpheus and Eurydice is intertwined with the complex relationship of Hades and Persephone. Eurydice, struggling with poverty, is lured to the industrial underworld of Hadestown by Hades, while Orpheus, a struggling musician, ventures down below to bring her back.
Stars: Reeve Carney, Eva Noblezada, André De Shields, Patrick Page, Amber Gray, Bella Brown, Madeline Charlemagne, Allie Daniel, Lauren Azania, Tiago Dhondt Bamberger, Waylon Jacobs, Christopher Short, Lucinda Buckley, Francessca Daniella-Baker, Winny Herbert, Ryesha Higgs, Miriam Nyarko
Director: Brett Sullivan
Rated: NR
Running Length: 142 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Five original Broadway principals crossed the Atlantic to be preserved with the West End cast, and the result is the best filmed musical in years. Andre De Shields alone makes it essential.
Hadestown: The Musical Review: A Five-Night Run That Wouldn’t Quit
Bleecker Street’s new offshoot for event-centered cinema, Crosswalk booked Hadestown: The Musical into American theaters for five nights starting July 24. Five. That’s the window a distributor hands an event screening it expects to be gone by Monday. Weeks later it was still on screens. In a single weekend it out-earned mega hit Hamilton’s first weekend in multiplexes.
In late July this was a one-off. By August it was a phenomenon. That didn’t happen on nostalgia. It happened because this is the finest capture of a stage musical I’ve ever sat in front of, and word moved faster than the booking. A physical media release has already been announced and you better believe I’ll be adding it to my library.
Composer Anaïs Mitchell spent the better part of fifteen years pushing this show up a hill. It started as a scrappy Vermont community piece she co-conceived with Ben t. Matchstick, became a 2010 folk-opera album, then found its shape at New York Theatre Workshop in 2016, Edmonton’s Citadel in 2017, and London’s National Theatre in 2018. Broadway came in April 2019. Eight Tony Awards followed, including Best Musical and Best Score, plus the 2020 Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album.
Two Love Stories and One Very Bad Bargain
The story’s older than that by a few thousand years. Hermes (André De Shields, a four-time Broadway force best known offstage from The Wiz) welcomes you in. He tells you flatly that this is a sad song and an old song. But they’re going to sing it anyway.
The world above ground is stuck in bad weather. The wind won’t quit, the crops won’t come, and nobody’s eaten properly in a while. Orpheus (Reeve Carney, House of Gucci) is a poor musician and Hermes’ ward. He’s writing a song he believes will put the seasons back where they belong. He proposes to Eurydice (Eva Noblezada) roughly ninety seconds after meeting her. She’s hungry, cold, and out of patience with men who promise things.
Below all this sits Hadestown. It’s an industrial underworld run by Hades (Patrick Page, In the Heights). Workers there build a wall that never gets finished. Sign on and you’ll never be cold or hungry again. You also never leave. His wife Persephone (Amber Gray, Master) spends half of every year down there and half up top. When she surfaces she brings summer with her, and she throws the party the season deserves. Hades comes up early to collect her, cutting summer short.
Then he goes looking for somebody who’ll appreciate what he built. It’s then he finds Eurydice, looking for warmth and stability. She goes with Hades, leaving Orpheus alone with a broken heart. Encouraged to fight for his love, Orpheus doesn’t hesitate. He goes down after her, facing a bargain too good to be true. Hermes already told you how this ends.
The Road to Hell Runs Through Shaftesbury Avenue
Five principals from the original Broadway company flew to London to reprise these parts alongside the West End cast. That’s not how filmed theater usually works. Proshots normally catch whoever’s in the building. This one reassembled the people who built the roles. Then it set them down among a company living the same show on another continent. The London ensemble absorbs the Americans like they had always been there.
De Shields is the reason to make the film at all. I saw him do this live on Broadway shortly after he won the Tony Award for the role, in a house so still at one point that you could hear a pin land three rows back. I’ve been telling people about it ever since. A performance like this used to vanish when the run closed, and now it doesn’t have to. He plays Hermes as part carnival barker, part undertaker, working the audience with a showman’s grin. Then, in the last ten minutes, he stops selling and simply tells you what happened. It positively destroyed me on Broadway. It wrecked me again years later watching this filmed version.
Everyone around him is operating at that altitude. Carney sings Orpheus with an open-throated earnestness that’d read as naive from a lesser performer. Noblezada answers him with a voice that seems to be tearing something loose. The two were newly dating when I saw the show on Broadway. They’re married now, and whatever that does to a duet, it’s doing it here. Page’s bass sits so low it feels structural, and Gray plays Persephone like a live wire somebody keeps stepping on.
The Fates are the surprise. Bella Brown, Madeline Charlemagne and Allie Daniel read differently from the Broadway trio, pitched lower and thicker. The change is an upgrade. Daniel holds the bottom with a contralto rich enough to rattle your sternum. The ensemble works brutally hard while making the labor look incidental. The onstage band, led by musical director Tarek Merchan, functions as cast and scenery at once.
A Wall Built Without Mud
Brett Sullivan has been doing this longer than almost anyone. His company, Steam Motion and Sound, has captured Waitress, Newsies and Frozen. It also caught Les Misérables at the O2 and Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall. He’s in post on Stranger Things: The First Shadow for Netflix right now. That’s another show worth preserving, since its size and the complexity of its secrets keep it from touring at that same scale. What he understands is restraint. He shoots the show the audience paid to see, not the one a camera could invent.
This was shot over three live performances at London’s Lyric Theatre in early 2025. Eight camera operators worked the room, plus Steadicam, jib and remote heads, and the coverage never gets excited about its own access. The wide shots let Rachel Hauck’s set breathe, all brick and iron and one devastating turntable that seals your fate or brings your forward to your destiny. Bradley King lights it in ambers and industrial greys that give the underworld its heat. Then the camera moves in, and it moves for a reason. A close-up arrives when a lyric needs a face attached to it, not because ninety seconds have gone by. Sullivan directs like a man who’s actually paid for a theater ticket.
The audio deserves special mention. Nevin Steinberg and Jessica Paz designed the stage sound, and film audio producer Lee McCutcheon mixed the capture at Pinewood. Mitchell writes dense, plainspoken lyrics that a bad room will swallow whole. Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose’s orchestrations stack trombone, cello, violin and double bass into arrangements that tend to go muddy fast. Nothing goes muddy here. You catch every word of the ominous, pointed “Why We Build the Wall,” which drives the action forward and sends the audience stunned toward intermission.
We Raise Our Cups, and We Roll the Cameras
Ticket prices are eating the live theatrical industry alive. The louder the conversation gets about who can afford a seat, the stranger it is that filmed captures remain a novelty. The Met has broadcast opera into movie theaters for years and nobody treats it as a threat to opera. Musicals keep acting like a camera in the room is a betrayal.
Hadestown: The Musical just spent a month proving otherwise in front of paying customers. A kid in Duluth got to see André De Shields perform a role he won a Tony Award for. That kid might now ask for tickets to the touring production, then a show downtown, then eventually the real trip east to Broadway. That’s how audiences get built, and it’s roughly how it happened to me. Preservation isn’t a threat to live theater. It’s a recruiting tool.
The show itself is one of the two or three best musicals written this new century, and on certain songs it clears Hamilton outright. Until somebody finally makes the feature adaptation this material has earned, here’s the definitive version. An unrepeatable company, caught at full strength, in a room that knew exactly what it was watching.
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