Anais Mitchell
Anaïs Mitchell performs "Hadestown"
Saturday, September 25
Tickets: $17 General Admission, $12 Members
Get tickets at: http://www.bethlehemcolonial.org/live_detail.php?live=a_mitchell
Available in advance at the Maia Papaya Café, Bethlehem, Village Book Store, Littleton, or reserve online. Reserved front & center seating $20 (available on-line only).
Showtime: 8 PM, Box office & refreshments @ 7 PM
"...gritty, intelligent folk-pop and soul-flavored music that sometimes also evokes Brecht/Weill..."
- Philadelphia Inquirer, March 2010
"Artfully conceived, articulated and produced, Hadestown raises Mitchell's creative bar exponentially; there isn't anything remotely like it."
- All Music Guide
Anaïs Mitchell's new album Hadestown is proof that music still has the power to surprise and delight. For starters, it's an honest-to-god album, the kind whose songs tell a story from beginning to end-specifically, the ancient Greek myth of the poet Orpheus and his doomed quest to rescue his wife Eurydice from the underworld. In Mitchell's hands, the familiar saga is reimagined as unfolding in a version of the U.S. that simultaneously evokes our Depression-era past, the current financial disaster (though it was written before the stock market collapse), and a post-apocalyptic future. It's a land where people hide behind walls in a misguided attempt to preserve their "freedom" and protect their riches.
"People often ask why I wanted to retell this particular myth," says Mitchell. "The truth is, the first few songs just came out of nowhere. It wasn't an academic idea or anything; the songs led to the myth, not the other way around. But once I got going I recognized in the Orpheus character something a lot of artists feel: his heartbreaking optimism. From its opening notes, Hadestown is packed with irresistible melodies and the kind of plainspoken poetry that is a hallmark of Mitchell's songwriting. It's a love story set at a time "when the chips are down"-an epic tale on a personal scale, a saga both ancient and new, mythical and all too real.
"It's a musical opera that's unlike any opera you've ever witnessed. It's Indie rock mixed with Dixieland. It's Homer's Odyssey as performed by Pink Floyd."
- blogocritics.org
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