Hadestown: Live from London (Warner Music Group’s Arts Music and Sing It Again Records).
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
Hadestown is all about cycles. If you’ve seen it, or are more than passingly familiar with the soundtrack, you know that it begins in just the same way that it ends. Life imitates art as Hadestown: Live from London recalls Hadestown: The Myth. The Musical, the original cast recording, some two years before the show debuted on Broadway. There is power bred into a live recording of this show, to an even greater degree than most, given how tied the piece is to ideas about changing performances, recurring stories, and so on.
This electricity noticeably manifests through humour. Onstage, Hadestown is often quite funny; Orpheus’ over-intense earnestness and the wry glances and comments (from Hades and Hermes in particular) cannot show through in the Original Broadway Cast Recording. Here, however, when Orpheus approaches Eurydice (a complete stranger) and chooses as his chat up line ‘Come home with me… [I’m] the man who’s gonna marry you’, the audience’s reaction is very clear and enjoyable.
That this is ‘live from London’ also bears heavily on the positive ways in which it differs from the OBC. Inheriting some elements from the Broadway replacements (female Hermes etc) and with a few wholly new changes of its own (the much-vaunted accent choices), the London album is a valuable record of some significant performance departures. Dónal Finn stands out here as much as he did on stage, an angrier and flightier Orpheus than Reeve Carney – not exactly superior, but reaching par in a very different way, which is lovely to have preserved alongside others. Ditto Melanie La Barrie (Hermes) is as excellent a complementary performance to André De Shields as one could hope for.
However, being a preservation of the creative choices made in the London transfer, the album also contains the jarring imperfections in that same amber. Evidently, choosing a new direction for Orpheus, Eurydice and Hermes works; while I found him convincing on stage, Zachary James’ (Hades) voice comes over a little weak in recording, and there’s no alteration to the character to make that feel right. This is unfortunately even more clear in the role of Persephone. Gloria Ontiri is an exceptionally talented performer, but directing her to try and out-Amber-Gray Amber Gray (who built the role over a decade or more) ends up sounding like a caricature, especially without the onstage visuals to balance out.
These issues are as much technical as anything else. A number of recent West End shows seem unable to properly mix their vocals in the theatre and one would hope that a recording would be significantly better, but unfortunately the details often get lost in the melee. This is most often an issue affecting Finn, which is a particular injustice, given how great his performance is.
All of this, good and bad, is underwritten by one strange fact: this is not a London Cast Recording, nor even a whole London Live Recording. While Act I moves through most of the main beats, Act II is truncated very heavily. As a result, there are fewer moments where the technical shortcomings behind a strong cast are laid bare, but it also overwhelms the natural continuity and ease of storytelling available to a live recording.
The humour, flashes of dialogue and live reactions all block in those tendons and sinews that connect the bones of a studio album, giving listeners priceless insights to how it feels in the room. And yet they are deprived of this for approximately half of the show (OBC runs to two hours, four mins, LFL one hour, nine mins).
In all honesty, it’s a baffling decision; while the fan in me hopes for an uncut version one day, my inner sceptic would be outraged by the categorical evidence of a cynical decision to try and profit twice by selling people a poorer version of something first. This is, of course, infinitely better than nothing, but leaves a lot to be desired (like the other half of the show…).
Tom Martland
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