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The biggest musical you’ve never heard of is finally coming to Sydney
By Nick Galvin
Hadestown, an offbeat, multi-award-winning Broadway and West End musical largely unheard of in Australia will premiere here next year.
Suzanne Jones, who is co-producing the show along with Opera Australia, calls Hadestown “one of the most successful musicals of all time – and one of the best-kept secrets”.
The cast of the West End production of Hadestown.Credit:
Hadestown, which opens at Sydney’s Theatre Royal in February 2025, is a modern reimagining of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice with music that combines New Orleans jazz with contemporary American folk.
“I saw it on Broadway just before COVID hit,” says Jones. “It was just beautiful. I had no idea what I was getting into. It’s a very simple set until about two-thirds of the way through. And then it’s not a very simple set, and it opens out into this quite miraculous thing.
“It’s about all the things we hold dear. It’s about love and passion, good and evil, dark and light and the grey in between and how we navigate that.”
Hadestown began life in 2006 in Vermont as a no-budget piece of independent theatre written by American singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell.
Suzanne Jones is co-producing Hadestown in Sydney next year.Credit: Louise Kennerley
Thirteen years later, it opened on Broadway and then, earlier this year, in London’s West End. In 2019, it was nominated for 14 Tony Awards, winning eight, and in 2020 it won a Grammy for the best musical theatre album. Since then, it has been seen by 3 million people and streamed more than 350 million times.
“It’s not just this little show that could, it’s this big show that did. It actually did,” says Jones, who hopes that Hadestown will strike a chord with Australian audiences in the same way as other hit musicals tackling quirky themes, including Come From Away and Hamilton.
“If someone had come to you and said, ‘Hey I’ve got a musical about this guy Alexander Hamilton that invented the American monetary system and we’re going to do it in slam poetry’, you’d have been, ‘Yeah, not really for me’. But it’s a gripping yarn and a fantastic show, and audiences here loved it.”
Opera Australia artistic director Jo Davies said the themes and music of Hadestown were a perfect fit for the company.
“After seeing this piece on Broadway, I thought how extraordinary it would be for audiences to see this classic myth reinterpreted once again for our times,” she said.
“I think it’s incredible that a new Broadway hit musical with a huge international following is based around the retelling of a Greek legend that also fascinated [operatic composer] Gluck in the mid-1700s. He, too, was desperate to make this tragic tale of love and loss speak to the universal, to really make it sing.”
Last month, Opera Australia chief executive Fiona Allan reconfirmed the company’s commitment to staging two musicals each year. In 2023, OA produced Miss Saigon and Phantom of the Opera, drawing a combined audience of more than 240,000, nearly half the entire audience for the year.
Open auditions for Hadestown will begin in Sydney on June 15.