Hadestown Feelings
This is usually the kind of thing I’d put in my personal journal, both because I’m not sure anyone cares and because I don’t think this is going to be a very long post. I planned to write up a little something tonight; I even put it on my to-do list. But then my laptop was just sitting here next to me and, well, I thought I’d share.
The last show I saw before things started shutting down in New York because of the pandemic was Hadestown. I’d been doing a decent job that winter of seeing Broadway shows. I think I’ve mentioned in other posts that I finally hit a point where I learned to say fuck it and start doing things by myself——shows, movies, meals. I saw, I think, six shows between January and early March 2020, most of them on my own. I do enjoy going with a friend or two, but sometimes you just want to sit in that theater without having to coordinate schedules.
Anyway, I got myself a ticket to see Hadestown after work one night in the first week of March. Having been a mythology girl in my youth, I was pretty excited about the show. I knew what it was about, mostly, but I hadn’t yet listened to any of the music, I don’t think, so I also was going in at least semi-fresh. I bought myself a $30 cocktail and settled into my aisle seat in the very last row of the orchestra.
By the end, I was a mess. To be fair, I cry at the drop of a hat as it is. Put on Titanic, and no matter my mood or what part the movie’s at, I will watch to the end, and I will sob as (spoilers for a 25-year-old movie here) Rose walks up the stairs to reunite with Jack in Titanic heaven. I can’t help it. I’ve cried at movies from Fly Away Home to Tick Tick Boom, and the last episode of Penny Dreadful, and the last 10 or so pages of Grady Hendrix’s My Best Friend’s Exorcism. There was a stretch where I couldn’t listen to “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” from Hamilton without losing it. When I was little, my parents used to say I was sensitive, or that I had a good heart. Nice things. I keep telling myself that, now that I’m an adult and regularly use my disposable income to watch things that make me cry.
Anyway, Hadestown. It’s a sad song, it’s a tragedy——they tell you that at the top. I knew what I was getting into. But I also had my own baggage to contend with back in March 2020. It was only a few days before my gran’s birthday, and only the second one without her, the second time my parents and I wouldn’t be bringing her White Castle for lunch with a few hands of Uno afterward.
Mild spoilers for the finale of Hadestown here (skip to the end of the paragraph to avoid), but I didn’t expect things to turn out how they did. I know the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but I also know how entertainment usually works. I was waiting for things to take a happily-ever-after turn for the entirety of Act 2. When they didn’t, I lost it. Something about losing someone you love really just hit me. And the part about loving that person anyway, even when you know it’s going to hurt. Diving back into conversations and relationships with the people who matter, even knowing it will all come to an end some day.
(Y’all need to know that I’m crying as I write this. I am such a sap.)
Fast forward a few days, it’s Gran’s birthday, and I’m spending my last day in the office at my old job (not that I knew that at the time). We started working from home the next day, and a few months later, I only went back to the office to clean out my desk before starting at a new company.
Fast forward some more, to today, August 13, 2022. I’ve since started at a new-new company. It’s evening now. And I went to see Hadestown again for the first time since March 2020 this afternoon.
The cast recording quite literally helped me survive lockdown in the spring of 2020. I listened to it so many times on Spotify; if I’d had an album, or a CD, or a tape, I’m sure I would’ve worn it out and had to buy another. My favorite song was/is “Wait for Me (Reprise).” The harmonies at the end fucking kill me, but also the opening lines: “The meanest dog you’ll ever meet? He ain’t the hound dog in the street. He bears some teeth and tears some skin, but, brother, that’s the worst of him. The dog you really got to dread is the one that howls inside your head. It’s him who’s howling drives men mad and a mind to its undoing.”
My mind was absolutely at its breaking point in the spring of 2020, like so many minds were. I was so fucking scared I was going to die, and I was so goddamn lonely. I was drinking too much. I didn’t want to work. I didn’t want to leave my apartment. I panicked every time I had to get groceries or do laundry, when I couldn’t ignore my needs anymore.
Sometimes, I would just lay on my couch and stare at the ceiling and listen to “Wait for Me (Reprise)” and let tears leak out of my eyes. Not so much crying as just . . . releasing. Something. Anything. Hadestown made it easy to channel feelings, to feel something, when I didn’t really remember how to do that.
Today’s performance of Hadestown wasn’t my first time back to Broadway. That distinction goes to a performance of Macbeth back in April, mostly because I wanted to be in the same room as James Bond. (Funnily enough, Amber Gray, the original Broadway Persephone in Hadestown, played Banquo. She was great.)
I didn’t cry as much seeing Hadestown this time, maybe because I don’t have any wounds that are quite as fresh as they were in 2020, maybe because I knew what was coming this time around.
But getting to see it live again was a privilege. And it made me feel . . . something.
