Film Director: Brett Sullivan (film)
Original Stage Direction: Rachel Chavkin
The lights haven’t fully settled before Hermes speaks, and the room goes quiet anyway. That’s the first sign that whatever made Hadestown work on stage has survived the move to screen intact.
Filmed during a limited West End run at the Lyric Theatre, this capture brings back the original Broadway cast, a rare thing for a production of this size. André De Shields plays Hermes less as a narrator than a ringmaster who already knows how the story ends and is enjoying the telling anyway. On stage, the applause for his entrance tends to swallow his first few lines. On film, nothing is lost. Every aside lands, every half-smile registers, and having watched the production live some years back, the intimacy is striking.
Eva Noblezada gives Eurydice a hard shell early on, all sarcasm and self-protection, which makes her slide towards Reeve Carney’s Orpheus feel like something she’s losing a fight against rather than falling into willingly. Their partnered dance work looks deceptively simple and clearly isn’t; the control required to make it read as casual is its own kind of achievement. Carney, meanwhile, finds the right amount of desperation for the second act without tipping into melodrama, and Noblezada’s face does a lot of the heaviest lifting in the show’s final stretch.
Amber Gray is the one performance that might actually improve on memory. Way Down Hadestown is brutal to dance and sing at once, and she does both while barely seeming to try. My Name sees her stack footwork, comic timing and a husky lower register on top of each other without anything slipping. Patrick Page’s Hades, by contrast, plays almost entirely in stillness, letting his voice drop into something closer to a threat than a song whenever the plot needs weight behind it.
Group numbers hold up particularly well under the camera’s scrutiny. Wait for Me, and Why We Build the Wall both demand tight unison across a revolving stage, not an easy ask, and the company, Fates included (Bella Brown, Madeline Charlemagne, Allie Daniel), stays locked together throughout. Hermes’ umbrella entrance partway through Ride That Train gets one of the biggest reactions of the night, on film as much as it clearly did live.
Underscoring all of it is the onstage band, cello, trombone, violin, keys, guitar, drums and double bass, led by Liam Robinson with orchestrations from Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose, playing something closer to a jazz set than a typical pit arrangement.
The format’s real advantage is angle. The camera gets underneath the choreography in a way no single seat could, and the shots of Hades and Persephone’s descent are better for it. Crowd noise is kept in too, so the applause still swells where it should, without losing the clarity a cinema screen allows.
Rachel Hauck’s set, Michael Krass’s costumes and Bradley King’s lighting all translate cleanly, and Nevin Steinberg and Jessica Paz’s sound work keeps the lyrics intelligible through some genuinely dense arrangements. This is less a document of the stage show than an argument for watching it this way.
Released on 13 October 2026
