An Interview with Anaïs Mitchell, Creator of ‘Hadestown: The Musical’

Once upon a time, there was a concept album. Vermont-based singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell found a knack for writing earthy folk odes to the underdogs and unheard around the early aughts. Her early works include tracks that carry an innate understanding of narrative storytelling. Thus, it made perfect sense when, in 2006, she started to perform what would become Hadestown.

Reeve Carney in 'Hadestown: the Musical' (courtesy of Bleecker Street and LD entertainment).

Twenty years and eight Tony Awards later, Hadestown has become a worldwide sensation. The show, which debuted off-Broadway in 2016, on the West End in 2018 then finally on Broadway, has been much lauded over the years for its jazzy and irreverent twists on the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice alongside Hades and Persephone.

The show, which transposes the myths into a Depression era pseudo-New Orleans and into a steampunk-cum-industrialist Hell, has garnered a massive following in the years since it opened. This year, film director Brett Sullivan collaborated with stage director Rachel Chavkin to bring a filmed version of the West End production to cinemas in the form of Hadestown: The Musical. It doesn’t mimic the typical theatrical pro-shot with clean capture and wide frames, but instead takes on a more intimate style that gets up close with the original stage cast (who returned for this film) and includes moments focused on the audience. 

Mitchell sat down with me around the film’s release to speak about how far the show has come, her thoughts on the lasting legacies of myth and what it means when a work of art withstands the test of time.

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This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

AUGUST HAMMEL: In 2006, you have the original [Hadestown concept performances]. In 2016, you have it starting off Broadway. And now, in 2026, it's being released in theaters in a limited engagement. Have you thought about how it's come in waves of 10? How has that impacted you in three separate [decades]? 

ANAÏS MITCHELL: I love that you said that, because I didn't think of that. I lost count of the number of iterations of the show because there was, in addition to what you just expressed, there was off-Broadway, there was Canada, there was London, then there was Broadway. But you're right – what is that, a span of 20 years? That's wild for me to think about, but it feels really right that 2026 is the moment where this piece that has been gathering, almost like a snowball, is now available to people in a wider format in the form of this film. 

Eva Noblezaba, Allie Daniel, Bella Brown and Madeline Charlemagne (image courtesy of Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment).

AH: How has your view of the work changed over 20 years through its iterations, through the original concept album to the show and now to it being so widely available through this release? 

AM: I just was putting one in front of the next for so many years and I didn't know. Nothing was a given. Like, the fact that we got the show put up off-Broadway was kind of a miracle in its own right, and then to do Broadway was another level. I think if I had known I was going to put a third of my life into it, I'm not sure that I would have ever started out. But it always felt like, “Oh, it's the next right thing” – that's a quote from Frozen II (2019) for you. 

There've been so many chapters and I really feel like you don't make a piece of music theater without an extraordinary amount of collaboration and even from the earliest days, you know, my orchestrators – I had Michael Chorney early on, Todd Sickafoose, who produced the album – both of them ended up working on the Broadway show. Meeting Rachel Chavkin in 2012, and seeing her really come to life in terms of her collaboration with Brett Sullivan, who directed this live capture, was so inspiring. I feel like we all are working on something that feels larger than ourselves. 

There were times working on Hadestown where it felt like this idea of the sculpture in the stone; there's a sculpture already in it, and you just chip around until you find, “That's the curve of the finger of the sculpture in the stone.” We would discover something and be like, “That's it. That's the thing," as if it already existed.

Patrick Page and Amber Gray (image courtesy of Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment).

I'm so proud of this film and this new chapter because I feel like it really is a snapshot of everyone's work, the visual world of the show, the original five actors that originated these principal roles on Broadway. It feels authentic and raw in the way that a music documentary feels. I couldn't be more inspired by the way that it turned out. 

AH: I got to see the show when it was touring in San Francisco in 2022 and I was thinking about the 2006, 2016, 2026 markers – I saw it in the middle of the Biden administration, but with those three markers of 10 years, it was originated under a Bush administration, came to Broadway under the [start of the] first Trump administration, and is now being released in this – I don't want to call it a pro shot. It feels more like Stop Making Sense (1984) [by] Jonathan Demme.  

AM: Oh, I love that you just said that. Rachel Chavkin will be so happy. That's a favorite movie of both of ours. 

AH: It's incredible! But this film is coming to people in the second Trump administration. The show is so political in its way. It is about labor rights. It's about climate change. But through it all, it's about love in the face of an overwhelming sense of dread. Was that something you were aware of in 2006 or when it came to the stage in the late 2010s?

AM: All of those themes are actually embedded in Greek mythology. Although some of them took teasing out or discovery – that chipping away at the stone. But there's something about Orpheus as a character: he's in love with Eurydice. He's an idealist. He believes that if he could make something beautiful enough, he could change the rules of the world. And then the story is obviously a love story. It's one of the great love stories of all time. It's a coming-of-age story as Orpheus becomes a man and decides to go to the underworld to try to win Eurydice back. 

Eva Noblezaba and Reeve Carney (image courtesy of Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment).

Then it also is inherently political because he comes up against and confronts the king of the underworld and the way that the world is. I feel like those are things that just keep on giving and in different ways that are surprising. Like you mentioned, that song, “Why We Build the Wall” – I wrote [it] in 2006, so it's a 20-year-old song, but at the moment that we were opening the show off-Broadway, that was when our current president was campaigning and it almost felt like that song was, verbatim, the language coming out of his mouth, which was a real surprise for it to feel new. People, of course, assumed it was written about that particular moment, which it wasn't. 

There've been other moments like that, I remember in 2018 we did the show in Canada, and it was right during the #MeToo movement. That song "Hey, Little Songbird" suddenly hit different. People were hearing it with different ears and I think that that will continue to happen.

It's the power of the myth, it's also the power of folk music and the retelling of old stories – that we're not alone in this moment politically. You're not alone also in this moment romantically. If you get your heart broken, this has happened before. A lot of that is in this telling of the myth. 

AH: This is a reinterpretation of a myth that's existed for centuries, but now your work [is] a piece that's existed for decades. Do you think about the fact that it's been with the public for so long and that it will have an even longer cultural tail? This is a show that has stood the test of time and I think will. Is that something you reckon with? 

AM: It's so mysterious to me. I remember when we were heading towards our opening on Broadway. We were in previews and I was working in Manhattan and I woke up – I was like not sleeping very well at the tail end of rewriting the show for Broadway – and I was up at like 5 am. I decided to go for a jog around Broadway and I jogged past our theater and I saw these young people dressed up as our characters waiting for rush tickets outside the theater. I thought, “Oh my god, I have no idea what this piece means to these kids. It's way bigger than me and it's bigger than anyone who worked on the piece. It has a life of its own.” 

It means so much to me that young people are finding themselves in the story and in the characters. Obviously, it's a story about a young person who can see the way the world could be, hasn't become jaded yet, and there is a young generation coming up with those eyes, with that bravery and that creative beginner's mind. That will continue to happen.

As jaded as we get, there will always be young people coming up. So to see folks performing it in high schools is like – it feels like me standing on the backs of who came before and then someone else standing on my back.

AH: I was thinking about the story of Hadestown and your retelling of both [myths]. There's a running thread through the show of death. It's about the underworld, [also] about the end of a part of time. That's the tragedy of the show and the myth, but that's also why we keep telling it. That's what bookends the show, “It's a sad song, but we sing it anyway.” 

I've been drawn toward myth recently, so getting to watch this, even on my laptop, was very comforting because it reminds me that we are part of an ongoing telling of these tales. Do you think about this a lot? I was listening to your recent self-titled album, and the song “Now You Know” really struck me as kind of a companion to the show in a way. Can you just speak a little bit about that and your relationship to the bigger picture? 

Eva Noblezaba, André De Shields, and Reeve Carney (image courtesy of Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment).

AM: Yeah... Isn't it funny that we are even able to go through our lives and not think about death non-stop? It's amazing, that “whistling past the graveyard” or whatever they call it. I'm in my mid-life now, it's amazing because when I started writing this piece, I was in my 20s and now I'm in my 40s and the change is just relentless.

I think of death in a metaphorical sense, about endings and how endings are also beginnings. We cannot stop time. We cannot freeze our lives in any given moment. It's a lesson that I feel I learn again and again and to try to show up authentically as things change all around us. 

I do identify with what you said about going to the myths for that reason. I think I've always been attracted to old stories, also old songs. You know, I have done two different musical projects, my folk rock band Bonnie Light Horseman, and also this "Child Ballads" record I made with my friend Jefferson Haymer that are reimaginings of ancient songs, old texts. It feels like a way to locate myself in time to feel less alone. Anything that is happening to you has happened to someone else. I think about that when I had my kids, getting ready to give birth, it's like, “Oh my God, how am I going to even do this?” I was like, “Well, you know, people have been doing this for thousands of years.” And that's also true about dying, right? Like we will breathe through it until we don't breathe anymore. 

AH: I was reading a previous interview, and you said that the melody of "Wait for Me" came to you and that was the seed of the show. Was the show built from there in its initial phase? Were you immediately drawn to this myth or love story? What was your guiding light? 

AM: The lines that came were the chorus of “Wait for Me,” but it also contained these lyrics which never ended up in the show, which went “Wait for me, I'm coming, in my garters and pearls. With what melody did you barter me from the wicked underworld?” And that's what told me, “Oh, it's about Orpheus and Eurydice.” And then I watched a bunch of – I was very inspired by Black Orpheus [1959] and this [Jean] Cocteau film called Orphée [1950]. Just all these retellings of the Orpheus myth. 

Eva Noblezaba and Reeve Carney (image courtesy of Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment).

Black Orpheus has the seed of a political idea in it because the underworld is a large monolithic-looking corporate bureaucratic building and the souls of people are these missing person identities that the janitor is sweeping up.

There are these very poetic takes on what the underworld could mean that I think I'm not alone in being like, “Well, what if it's not death per se? What if it's a choice of a lifeless existence or choosing security versus freedom, choosing wealth, the wealth that comes from the underworld?” It all felt of a piece. 

I was very influenced by labor union organizing songs that I would have picked up on as a child of hippies growing up in Vermont: folk music, Americana. The orchestrators of the show, Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose, were so essential to the character of the music because they come from a jazz and kind of art rock background. And like the trombone, the sound of the band feels like it's a New Orleans street band. I think those guys are responsible for that. To give you another Greek metaphor, I followed the thread into the labyrinth and this is where we are now. 

AH: Broadway is such an ephemeral thing. It lives in the mind, it lives in the memory, and now we have it recorded. Part of the Stop Making Sense comparison is [because] the film cuts to the audience, which you don't see in a lot of pro-shots, which is why I don't want to call it a pro shot. You see the joy, you see the rapture, and that everyone's caught up in the show. How does it feel to have the project captured now? Everyone's Broadway experience is different, but now this will be the one memory that people have of the show for a lot of people. So how does that feel for you as the originator? 

AM: I love that you said that because I really feel like there is a beautiful collaboration between Brett Sullivan, who directed the film, and Rachel Chavkin. They edited together and found this mythic space in the filming that was very intimate, because there are shots, there are close-ups. You can really see aspects of the emotional storytelling of these actors that you couldn't see from an audience seat. But then also you never forget that you're in a theater – in this case, the Lyric Theater on the West End – and you can see the audience and we get the full stage picture, which feels sort of epic. And it feels like it captures a night or an event, which I think Stop Making Sense also does. 

 Reeve Carney (image courtesy of Bleecker Street and LD Entertainment).

I'm really grateful that this is the version that the world is gonna get to see. I think they're gonna have access in a lot of ways. Access to the theater show that they may or may not be able to afford to go see, and then also access emotionally to these characters, and also to what the experience might feel like if you were sitting in the theater. 

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Hadestown: The Musical is playing in theaters now for a limited time. 

-August