Anaïs Mitchell’s road to Broadway started somewhere around Virginia.
She thinks.
“In my memory, I’m on Interstate 81. Is that Virginia?” Mitchell asks me with a laugh. (Looking at a map, it could be.)
Either way, “it was a long drive up the East Coast” in 2005. The then-24-year-old Vermonter/recent Middlebury College grad was hungry to make it as a singer/songwriter and driving to her next gig, when these lyrics popped into her head:
Wait for me, I’m coming / In my garters and pearls / With what melody did you barter me / From the wicked underworld?
“I was like: This sounds like Orpheus and Eurydice,” Mitchell, now 43, says in our recent phone interview.
Soon, “Hadestown” was a scrappy DIY Vermont-based production. By 2010, it was a “folk-opera” studio album, featuring Ani DiFranco, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and more. By 2019, “Hadestown” — intertwining two mythic tales, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Hades and his wife Persephone — was a bonafide Broadway hit, with music, lyrics, and book by Anaïs Mitchell; developed with and directed by Rachel Chavkin. It scooped up eight Tonys, and the 2020 Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album.
This week, Mitchell is bringing it all back home: A tour of “Hadestown” runs at Boston’s Boch Center Wang Theater now through April 28.
Mitchell has essentially grown up along with her brainchild. Gone from a 20-something gigging at Boston T stops to landing on the TIME 100: Most Influential People in the World 2020.
With husband Noah Hahn and two kids, Mitchell has moved back to the Vermont family farm where she grew up, splitting her time between the “family compound” near Middlebury and her “New York spot.”
I called Mitchell to talk “Hadestown,” its Boston roots, and finding the sculpture in the stone — she also remembered a long-forgotten part of its origin story, and revealed she has a new play in the works.
Boston.com: So how does it feel to bring “Hadestown” to Boston?
Anaïs Mitchell: I’m very excited. “Hadestown” has a deep history in Boston. In 2007, we’d created this DIY, early-Vermont version of “Hadestown.” We actually drove down in a school bus and put it on at the Somerville Theatre.
When the studio record came out in 2010, I was trying to figure out how to tour with it. I didn’t really know how. I did some shows with Michael Chorney, one of my orchestrators, and his band, but it was just me singing every song. [laughs]
When we decided to do a show in Boston, I thought: “I have so many friends there, I wonder if I could get them to sing the roles.” There’s such a strong music community in Boston — artists who show up for each other. So we did that at Club Passim in 2010. There were more people on stage than in the audience. [laughs]
[laughs] Right.
But it blew things wide open. We went on to recreate that show all over. It was because of Boston that it felt possible.
So this all started with that one random stanza that popped into your head while driving. Only one line made it in the final version.
The only line in the show now is: “Wait for me, I’m coming.” But those other lines about the garter — which is a wedding thing — and the underworld, that’s what led me to the story. Oh, yeah! I also kind of wrote it for my guy — my man I married. Because I had to do all this running around as a songwriter — I was young, ambitious; I wanted to get out in the world. But I was saying to him: “Wait for me. I’m going to come back and marry you.” That’s so funny. I just thought of that now.
I love that. And you got married?
Yes. In 2006.
That’s awesome. So had you grown up reading Greek myths? Why did you immediately think of that myth?
I had the D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths when I was a kid. That myth always spoke to me. I can picture the…
This article was originally published by a www.boston.com . Read the Original article here. .