📆 Tuesday, October 31st – Sunday, November 5th
📍 The Paramount Theatre: 911 Pine Street, Seattle
🎟 Starts @ $30
I’m not really an “adult Halloween party” person, nor am I emotionally built for slowly wandering around converted warehouses and somebody shouts “BOO!” every so often. So on Halloween night, you’ll find me at the Paramount for another round with Hadestown, the eight-time-Tony-winning musical written and composed by Anaïs Mitchell and directed by Rachel Chavkin (the equally sensational Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812).
Hadestown isn’t so much set in a particular time and place but with the feel, the rhythm, the soul of Depression-Era New Orleans. Folk rock, jazz, gospel, and the blues divinely intermingle as the show mournfully relays the tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice. A poor troubadour and a young wanderer fall in love in a desolate land. Meanwhile, Hades is going through his own relationship issues with the goddess Persephone and sets his sights on Eurydice, hoping to enlist her as a faceless worker at the capitalist hellscape underground factory that gives the play its title. When Orpheus learns of what has happened to his beloved, he journeys to the underworld to retrieve her. You may know the rest of the myth, but as the show’s narrator, Hermes, intones, “It’s a sad song, but we keep singin’ even so.”
First staged in 2006 and then made into a concept album in 2010, its eventual Broadway run is one of this century’s most unanticipated theatre success stories. The production survived the pandemic and, four years into its run, still sells at near-full capacity and is the longest-running show in the history of the Water Kerr Theatre. And now, the newest national tour couldn’t come at a better time.
It’s Halloween. Let’s go way down to Hadestown, way down under the ground.
