Hadestown (musical) Hadestown (musical) Hadestown: The Myth. The Musical is a 2016 stage musical adaptation of the 2010 folk opera concept album by the same name by Anaïs Mitchell. It premiered off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop on May 6, 2016 and ran through July 31. The show was developed for the stage and directed by Rachel Chavkin. Like the original concept album, "Hadestown" tells a version of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where Orpheus journeys to the underworld to rescue his fiancée Eurydice. As in the 2010 album, "Hadestown" adapts the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to a
Greek mythology and she burst forth from his head—fully-grown and dressed for war. The earliest Greek thought about poetry considered the theogonies to be the prototypical poetic genre—the prototypical "mythos"—and imputed almost magical powers to it. Orpheus, the archetypal poet, also was the archetypal singer of theogonies, which he uses to calm seas and storms in Apollonius' "Argonautica", and to move the stony hearts of the underworld gods in his descent to Hades. When Hermes invents the lyre in the "Homeric Hymn to Hermes", the first thing he does is sing about the birth of the gods. Hesiod's "Theogony" is not only