By Brian Wise
Hadestown, the theatre musical created by Anais Mitchell, is in Melbourne until July 13, after a season in Sydney.
Anais Mitchell is a Vermont-based singer-songwriter and the Tony and Grammy award-winning creator of the Broadway musical Hadestown. She was named in Time magazine’s prestigious TIME100 list in 2020, and her first book, Working On A Song – The Lyrics of Hadestown was published by Penguin/Plume in the same year.
Mitchell’s recorded works are the original 2010 studio album of Hadestown, a folk opera based on the Orpheus myth; 2012’s Young Man in America; 2013’s Child Ballads, a collaboration with Jefferson Hamer and Anais Mitchell (2022).
There are also three albums with Bonny Light Horseman, an outfit that also includes Josh Kaufman and Eric D. Johnson. Their latest album, Keep Me On Your Mind/See Me Free, is a double album that began life in an Irish pub before being finished in several studios in New York State.
Anais Mitchell’s stage show of Hadestown was first produced off-Broadway and in 2018 opened at London’s National Theatre, before transferring to Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre in April 2019. The show went on to win 8 Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Score for Mitchell.
Earlier this year I caught up with Mitchell prior to her visit as a member of Bonny Light Horseman, who appeared at the Port Fairy Folk Festival and Womadelaide. A week before my conversation with Mitchell I also spoke to AllisonRussell who had just played the role of Persephone in the Broadway production.]
To set the scene, let’s recap my conversation with Allison Russell about appearing as Persephone in the Broadway production of Hadestown.
Tell us what it’s like being on Broadway, because that is a really big step. Was it a bit nerve wracking starting the whole thing?
Very much. I don’t know that I’ve ever been that scared in my life as my debut night. I almost ran away, but I didn’t, of course, in the end. Very, very challenging, but also really galvanizing. Fascinating. I’ve definitely been bitten by the acting bug now. It’s a piece I love so much. I think the world of Anais Mitchell as a writer. She’s been a beloved friend and one of my favourite writers on the planet for well over 15 years now. So, it’s an honour to get to embody the version of Persephone that is part of the Hadestown world. It really is, and it’s such a powerful piece, not just of art and music, but it speaks to a lot of what’s happening in our dystopian realities lately, especially here in America.
Well, interestingly enough, you wrote a song called ‘Persephone’ and that was on your album Outside Child. That’s an interesting coincidence.
Well, it’s part of the story of the road to this role in Hadestown. I was opening a significant portion of Hozier’s Unreal Unearth tour in North America and a little bit in Europe. With his fandom and the Hadestown fandom, there’s quite a lot of overlap actually, which makes sense when I think about the kind of writers that Hozier and Anais are and the way that they are always excavating in delving and extrapolating from these ancient archetypal mythologies, whether it be in his case, Dante’s Inferno for his last album, or in Hades and Persephone for Hadestown. On that tour I was playing the song ‘Persephone’ from Outside Child, and his fans got really into that song and then they started saying that I should be Persephone in Hadestown.
I didn’t realise quite how creative I am when I dance around on stage and there was something reminiscent to them of the original, incredible actor actress who originated the role on Broadway, Amber Gray. They started saying she should be the next person posting images of me.
Shortly afterwards, Russell’s partner/co-producer and co-writer JT mentioned to Mitchell in a text that Russell would love to play the role of Persephone if it ever came up. Coincidentally, it happens that they were thinking of rotating the role with special guests, so the timing was perfect.
So, here we are, this full circle moment. The first time I heard her sing ‘Why We Build The Wall’ was in 2008, opening for JT’s band, JT and The Clouds, at a concert series called Sings like Hell in Santa Barbara at the Lobero Theater. Here we are full circle and I’m making my Broadway debut in that role. It’s just been an absolute honour and a joy and a privilege and something I never imagined I would ever get to do in my career or life.
This show has won Tony Awards for its choreography and its lighting and its design and was Best New Musical, the only Best New Musical ever in history of the Tony’s both written and directed by women to win. I did not want to be the one dragging the ensemble down. So, I really put in the homework. I was in about six weeks of rehearsal prior to my debut, and I worked very, very hard for about 11 hours every day to make sure that I wouldn’t be the weak link on stage.
This is where I took up the conversation with Anais Mitchell:
Brian: I was talking to a friend of yours just last week, Alison Russell.
Anais: Oh, good God. I love Allie so much. I have known her for a long time. We go way back to her early days in the folk scene, and now she’s performing the role of Persephone in my show, Hadestown. So, it’s been a long friendship with many chapters.
She’s incredible. I know she’s an incredible performer, but I didn’t know if she had any acting experience at all. I just sort of figured she would be there as the incredible singer that she is, but she’s really acting, she really bringing so much of herself and her heart and her emotions to the character. It totally blew me away.
Of course, she wrote a song called ‘Persephone’, didn’t she?
That’s right. There was some kind of pipeline where she wrote that song and she did a lot of touring with Hozier. She supported a bunch of his tours. Still does. A lot of his fan base came to her and really went deep with her songs. Some of them knew about Hadestown, and they started a sort of whisper campaign about that Allison should be Persephone. So, it’s kind of amazing that it actually came to pass. Really beautiful.
Can you tell us about the show? It’s got such acclaim and it’s been so successful, and you’ve had quite a substantial career yourself.
So, Hadestown is a piece of music theatre. It’s based on Greek mythology. It basically tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice and also Hades and Persephone. It’s set in a kind of mythic but post-apocalyptic dreamscape.
It’s a project that I started when I was in my twenties, my early twenties. I was right out of school. I was starting a career as a singer songwriter. I did a version of it in the state of Vermont where I am from and then made a studio record with some more well-known guest singers and toured with it as a kind of concert piece. Then I moved to New York City, met the director, Rachel Chavkin, kept developing it and developing it. Essentially, it was a 12-year or 13-year process before we landed on Broadway in 2019. So, I lived with it for so long. It really took over my whole identity creatively and I almost don’t even know what it is at this point.
I put so many years into it and now it has a life of its own. I’m so grateful it’s happening in Australia now. It’s on Broadway, it’s on the West End. Sometimes I don’t understand it myself but it’s a big part of my life.
So, what inspired in the first place? Things that you’d been studying or things that you were quite interested in, or what was the original inspiration?
I wasn’t a mythology person per se. I remember reading the Orpheus myth when I was a little kid in an illustrated children’s book of mythology, and it always spoke to me. It’s great for a musician. The hero is a musician. When I started working on it, I was right out of college. I was kind of a young. I was an idealist and kind of a dreamer and a creative young person and coming out into the world up against the way the world is at some level.
Politically speaking, it was George W. Bush’s second term. Then of course I was like, ‘Now I have to have a job, and I have to pay the rent and things like that’. So, it felt like a coming-of-age moment for me.
I think that also is the story of Orpheus. He’s essentially this beautiful, faithful dreamer that comes up against the harsh reality of the way the world is in the original mythology. That’s the underworld. You can’t get a dead person back. In this telling, it’s more like can the way the world can be changed by art or by music, or by love or by faith. It just felt like a story that kept giving. Obviously, I worked on it for so long that by the time I was heading for Broadway, I’m at a much different life phase than I had been, but it felt like I had had a chance to really identify with other characters in the story.
But it is essentially a love story, a coming-of-age story, and then something inherently political about that coming of age.
You mentioned apocalyptic dreamscape. I think that’s what we’re in right at this very moment, isn’t it?
I know, right? It hits a little close to home,
But we don’t have to talk about that. So, you’ve had this incredibly successful musical. You’ve had eight albums of your own. Why did you feel the need to join a band?
Gosh, this band happened for me at exactly the moment that I needed it. I was definitely really focused on Hadestownand putting the point that I was heading for Broadway. It was a lot of adrenaline going on for me in terms of needing to get it right or as good as it could get. It was almost like if you’re doing a crossword puzzle and there’s three clues left, and it can’t be anything. It’s not like you’re playing in the sandbox anymore. It’s like, it’s got to be this one thing, a sort of a grim kind of determination.
Then I met Josh [Kaufman]. We were both living in Brooklyn at the time, and we got together to do a session, and we realised that we both shared this love of old trad songs, especially stuff from across the pond. We started to mess around with it and we de-tuned the guitars: so, they’re all open D tuning, very wide open and kind of spacious and relaxing and soaring. It felt like it was just like the medicine I needed. It was the opposite thing creatively to what I was doing with Hadestown at that moment.
Then I met Eric through Josh. I had never met Eric, but I was a late blooming fan of Fruit Bats, his band. When Josh suggested that we ask him if he wanted to do this project, I was like, ‘Yes, great idea’. I had no idea if I would get along with him or if our voices would sound good together or what it would be like. But that turned out to be just a really cosmic special thing to sing with him and to be in a band where I wasn’t the lead singer, but there were really two lead singers. Sometimes Josh sings also, or sometimes it feels like he’s singing with his guitar. The guitar takes over where words leave off.
That experience of collectively making music and then our larger band – with JT Bates and Cameron Ralston – really feels like it’s just such a healing exercise in kind of losing ourselves, shedding our own identities. Anais Mitchell is not Hadestown. It’s like some other thing and I’m just part of it and it feels so good. So, I feel like in a way it had to be. It was as if there was a Bonny Light Horseman shaped hole in my life, and then the band came along and that’s what I needed.
Is there a division of labour? I can imagine what strengths you each bring to it. How does the writing process work?
We co-write everything. We are all getting in there on everything. Of course, we all have our little superpowers, and it feels good to lean into that sometimes. But it’s not like it always goes down the same way. It’s not like I’m writing all the lyrics or Eric’s writing all the hooks, or Josh is writing all the guitar riffs. Each song that comes will come from someone in the band as just a little nugget and then get exploded and explored and developed by the three of us. Occasionally, on this last record, there were some songs that I feel like as we’ve gotten more comfortable with each other, we can sit in a room and just throw ideas around musical or lyrically. So, it’s a little less clear almost who played what role where in those songs.
I do feel like I’m getting to a level of comfort with those guys with co-writing, which is a very vulnerable activity. You’ve got to be willing to throw out ideas that are not good in order to get to the good ones. It has taken a process to get there with them. I think we all feel safe to fail and stuff. It was helpful that the first record we made was really leaning on the traditional material because it was a way in with those guys where we weren’t coming up with everything from scratch. I feel like still what we’re trying to do is write songs that are coming from the three of us; coming from our lives, but they also can be in conversation with the trad stuff and could feel like they came from hundreds of years ago,
Hadestown is at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne until July 13.
Keep Me On Your Mind/See Me Free, is available in all formats now.