Tony-winning Hadestown takes audiences to hell and back in irresistible musical

Lana Gordon and company in Hadestown, the Tony-winning musical that opened Tuesday at the Jubilee. (Photo: Broadway Across Canada)

If you find yourself not knowing what the hell is going on in the opening moments of Hadestown, don't sweat it.

The Tony-winning musical, which is in town at the Jubilee through the weekend, opens in what appears to be a turn-of-the-20th-century New Orleans brothel – or maybe that's just what it looked like to me.

There's a house band onstage including a magnificent trombone, which flutters out a solo right at the top of the show that positively shouts "Nawlins"! in all the best ways, I might add.

The thing is, it might not be New Orleans these characters are in. It might be someplace a hell of a lot hotter than that.

Hadestown is a song cycle created by Anais Mitchell and developed in collaboration with director Rachel Chavkin that turns the Greek myth of Orpheus (J.Antonio Rodriguez) and Eurydice (Amaya Braganza), two young lovers who get caught in a love triangle with Hades (Matthew Patrick Quinn), who's having marital troubles with Persephone (Lana Gordon).

It all takes place in a netherworld that looks like a saloon, complete with a host of sorts, Hermes (Will Mann), a narrator who sings and dances alongside the Fates, three characters who look like the Pointer Sisters and a gaggle of workers, a chorus of hard-working folks with great arms.

Matthew Patrick Quinn and company in Hadestown, at Calgary's Jubilee Auditorium through Sunday. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

There's a journey that Orpheus must go on when he discovers his true love Eurydice has landed in Hades, but truth be told, you don't go to Hadestown for the storytelling, which is delivered through its poetic song lyrics, along with some superb choreography by David Neumann.

You go for the music.

BEGUILING BLEND

Hadestown's soundtrack is a beguiling blend of folk and jazz and bluesy balladeering that feels pulled from a box of dusty records in your grandpa's basement. Mitchell is a kind of revivalist of old American musical genres, a preserver of the songs of the Woody Guthrie songbook: depression-era working-class anthems, church music and jazzy, Cajun-infused southern melodies -- every musical form that oppressed peoples created to help get themselves through their day grinding out a life.

It's also something else: a climate-change-driven musical. Hadestown is also a company town where the oil and coal comes from, and Hades is presented as a pinstriped corporate titan whose primary tactic is to offer economic stability to everyone who cares to join him in his hot hometown.

Quinn's Hades sits out the first 35 or so minutes as the other characters sort out the world, but once he arrives, his presence dominates the proceedings, as he woos Eurydice and parries with Persephone.

The workers grind away, in a robotic sort of choreography that seems to be pulled from a 1930s worker-rights animation – and it's sort of cool.

The band sounds magnificent and the set, by Rachel Hauck, is spectacularly evocative, in a not-too-splashy, beaten-up 1930s, backwoods kind of way.

It's the distressed jeans of Broadway musical sets.

Quinn's booming baritone competes with Rodriguez's soaring vocals for space, until they're interrupted by the workers singing a song about building a wall to keep the poor people out that evoked one of the biggest campaign issues of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It comes with a big percussive backbeat that evokes another unique musical, Machinal, a play by Sophie Treadwell, about the first woman to be executed in the U.S.

Quinn's Hades and Gordon's Persephone are the old married couple and their powerhouse performances are what propel Hadestown toward an ending that turns out to be surprisingly emotionally satisfying, no matter how much you struggle to put the story together in your head.

A lot of Broadway musicals seem to be cookie-cutter adaptations of something someone once did better on a movie screen, or in a concert hall.

Hadestown, which was developed at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2016 and Edmonton's Citadel Theatre in November 2017 prior to moving to successful runs in London's West End and Broadway, is the farthest thing from cookie-cutter.

It's a true original: the first great carbon-tax-era musical.

For ticket information, go here.