Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘Hadestown’

Aug 3

Hadestown on Broadway

I love Anaïs Mitchell’s album “Hadestown,” (2010) which I blogged about in 2015. I was thrilled to learn that the album, which was composed as a folk opera, had been turned into a Broadway show now running at the Walter Kerr theater. For my birthday in the spring, Jeff proposed that we go. We saw it on Wednesday. It’s good. It’s about art broadly construed and politics and what art should do and how art fails politics and what to do with the failure. It’s a show about Eurydice and Orpheus. It’s a show about right now. The end of the show found me with tears streaming down my face. So I think it did its job.

Read more

May 4

2 Comments

New to You Music in 2015: Anaïs Mitchell, Hadestown

I said at the beginning of the year that I’d listen more to new music and write about it. I did that once so far.  I was a little overwhelmed with all the different new things I should be listening to.  Then in the freshmen colloquium course I taught this semester, we had a class session where we read and listened to protest songs–Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Woodie Guthrie, Rage Against the Machine.  We talked about what makes protest songs work as protest songs.  In the next class meeting, students were asked to bring in their favorite protest songs.  To get things started, I offered my own: Anaïs Mitchell’s “Why We Build the Wall.” Read more