Broadway shows can be notoriously soul-sucking for musicians, who are usually in a pit or an offstage room. Most often they can’t see the stage. When they’re not playing, they amuse themselves by playing cards, watching baseball, or knitting. Hadestown is different. The musicians are onstage. You can’t do anything except watch the show.
Hadestown has been running for almost 2000 performances. I sub on the famous trombone chair, which I wrote about for Slate back in 2019. I have played in around 120 shows. Brian Drye, the chair holder, has done around 1100. Hadestown’s trombone part is uniquely engaging, with unusual opportunities for improvisation, but still, after 100 times, it’s hard to keep one’s focus.
If your mind wanders when you’re not playing, or even when you are, you have to do something to keep your concentration. One of my favorite things to do is to just pick a character and watch them intently for an evening. Because of the huge number of performances and the fact that the musicians are so close to the action, we have become expert observers of stage acting.
Rachel Chavkin, the director of the show, and Anaïs Mitchell, the writer, have undoubtedly seen the play hundreds of times, with each actor, from the house seats. But only the trombone players have sat close enough to Andre de Shields to see individual droplets of sweat falling from his brow. When actors turn around to face the band, with their backs to the audience, we see them stay in character, break character, laughing at private jokes, laughing in character at lines they’ve heard 1000 times, drinking ice water, blowing their noses, mouthing hi to musicians who might not have done a show in a while, or grimacing in pain after a taxing dance.
We have seen Andre say “All Aboard!” dozens, or even hundreds, of times, and then seen the same line uttered by Lillias White, Jon Jon Briones, Daniel Breaker, Malcolm Armwood, Max Kumangai, T Oliver Reid, Ahmad Simmons, and Stephanie Mills.
Cellist Marika Hughes has been in the band since the show was off-Broadway in 2017 and estimates she has done “about half” of Broadway, off Broadway, previews and various rehearsals, well over 1000.
She told me a bit about her experience with the actors.
I watch the actors every night. How I engage with the actors changes nightly, depending on my mood and what’s on my mind.
Every night I make eyes with certain actors at various times throughout the show, like a ritual. Everyone has their little moments with each other. There is always an internal engagement with one another on stage, no matter what mood anyone is in.
We each have the actors that we love most to watch and listen to, and look forward to seeing them perform. When there’s a cast change, especially in a lead role, I perk up and pay much more attention. The new actor is scrutinized and enjoyed, their choices and interpretations put to the test with the band, the old guard of the material at this point.
After being on a theater gig for six years, I absolutely understand acting in a new way. Theater actors are beasts. Eight shows a week. A personal day looked down upon by the powers that be. The stamina alone is mind-boggling. It has also been a pleasure to see how actors make new choices, with the same material, night after night. The thing I’ve learned about acting is that it’s not easy. Just standing on stage, holding oneself present and quiet is a remarkable skill.
Most freelance musicians have working relationships with people in certain fields: arts administrators, instrument makers, music business people, stage crew, audio engineers, bartenders, club managers, waitstaff. I have worked with a fair amount of dancers and choreographers over the years. But interactions with actors are rare. Even people who score films and tv usually work with a director and various other crew and don’t often interact with actors.
When I subbed in the pit on Fiddler on the Roof I did 40 shows in a year but never saw the stage. The actor’s dressing rooms were completely siloed from the musicians’ area. I saw an actor backstage once.
In contrast, from my first run-throughs at NY Theater Workshop in 2017, Hadestown was full of startlingly intimate interactions with actors. In the Broadway version, before the show starts, half the band gathers on one side of the stage with a worker and Eurydice and we chit-chat, do some stretching, and wait for the red light bulb which signals our entrance. Many of the actors hang out with the musicians backstage, sometimes after the show, and sometimes come to see the musicians play their own shows.
As the number of shows a musician has done adds up, the “Groundhog Day” phenomenon, reliving the same 2.5 hours over and over, except with different actors, means tiny changes in timing or inflection can take on monumental importance. The various subs and replacements have used these nuances to carve out their own spaces instead of trying to mimic the original cast. On a two show day, musicians would sometimes observe two different actors delivering the same lines, hours apart.
One of my favorite lines to obsess over is the biggest laugh of the night. Orpheus starts to sing for Hades and Hades says “oh, it’s about me, huh?” Patrick Page always got a huge response. Through slightly different timing, Phillip Boykin got an even bigger laugh. The actual difference in delivery might be a tenth of a second pause, a minor third drop in vocal register, or a raised eyebrow. Various choices Boykin made, from acting to dancing, played up the comedic side of the role, and made the whole show funnier. Page’s Hades was more menacing. He was terrifying. You were afraid to laugh. The choices they made reflected their own acting styles.
These superb actors, through microscopic decisions, created two different shows. Each show worked equally well. That the show could absorb these changes and be at times funnier, sadder, scarier, more political, or more romantic, strikes me as a sign of longevity. The best thing for a show to survive is being able to change to be all these things.
Due to a bum knee I haven’t been doing Hadestowns for the last few months but I will return this fall. I’m going to be watching, as always.
I've been in the chorus for community opera companies. One thing a director said to us that stuck with me was:
Someone out there is seeing it for the first time. Someone out there is seeing it for the last time.
(This applies more to an opera warhorse like La Traviata than to Hadestown, of course.)
Excellent posting, Jacob, a view of the world where acting and music intertwine in the same space, a view that the vast majority of us never see.