This review may contain spoilers.
I've now seen Hadestown four times since it came out. Four. This thing was supposed to be in theaters for five nights. We're going on three weeks now, and I keep finding another group of friends to go see it with. So I'm doing a second review, because I need to correct the first one where I gave it four and a half stars. I cheated this movie. Five stars. I knew I really liked it the first time I saw it. What I didn't know was that I was going to go back three more times and love it every single time. I like musicals, so I'm obviously a sucker for this stuff, but I haven't had this much fun with a musical since Hamilton. I'm not saying it's better than Hamilton. Hamilton is ridiculous. But Hadestown is as good as anything else out there, and the more I watch it the more impressed I am with how well written the whole thing is. The music is wonderful. The cast is wonderful. Reeve Carney and Eva Noblezada have all the charm you need at the center of this thing as Orpheus and Eurydice. Amber Gray is great as Persephone. Andre De Shields and Patrick Page are fantastic. Those two just own Hermes and Hades at this point. I wish I'd seen this original cast on Broadway when the show first came out. Freaking COVID effed up a lot of things over the last half decade, including my ability to get up to New York and see some of these productions when I wanted to. I missed this one. This proshot gives some of that back. They brought the five original Broadway principals over to the West End production and filmed them at the Lyric in London doing the roles they originated, and now I can walk into a movie theater in Atlanta and watch it with my friends. That's fantastic. It also makes me want more proshots in theaters. I don't know what that does to Broadway economically, and I'm not going to sit here advocating for something that ends up hurting musical theater. If putting shows in movie theaters too early means people stop buying tickets, then obviously there's a problem. But there has to be some middle ground. Hadestown has been running on Broadway for seven years. It's still running at the Walter Kerr. The original cast moved on a long time ago, and most of the world never had a shot at seeing those people do those roles. Why not preserve that? Most Americans are never getting to Broadway. Most people on Earth are never getting to Broadway. That doesn't mean they shouldn't have access to great musical theater. World culture deserves it. American culture deserves it too. And this was done correctly. Nobody stuck a camera in the back of the house and recorded a stage. They turned the theatrical experience into a real movie experience without losing the fact that you're watching live theater. Brett Sullivan did a great job with it. I want more of this. Again, assuming I'm not accidentally advocating for the destruction of Broadway. As for Hadestown itself, I don't have some new complicated analysis after a fourth viewing. I just love this movie. I've paid to see it four times. I've brought different people with me. I've loved it every time. If you're reading this and still wondering whether you should go see Hadestown, just go see it. I'm correcting the record.