Anais Mitchell's folk-pop musical success – Rolling Stone

The set of Hadestown, the Broadway musical for 14 Tony Awards on June 9, features a set with lamps that sway wildly and a hatch that throws people into the underworld. But as the author of the series, Anais Mitchell, shows, the series has not always been so sophisticated. She drinks the iced drink she's sipping at a Times Square cafe, a few blocks south of the theater HadestownMitchell remembers how the first version of the series tackled a scene in which one of the main characters is bitten by a venomous snake.

"I speak on the [landline] phone to Hades, and I turn around, "said Mitchell, standing up and mimicking this movement," and I'm wrapped in this phone cord, and it's a snake. And then the Fates approached and cut the cord, and I'm dead! She stops turning around and laughs. "We spent a lot of telephone cords."

Mitchell and Hadestown have come a long way since then. The book of the show – written by Mitchell, who also wrote all the words and music – has remained pretty much the same since his debut in 2006: the Greek-mythical tale of Hades and his wife Persephone and, at the same time, Orpheus and his condemned lover Eurydice, located in hell and the world above. Upon their return, the score is steeped in New Orleans folk, pop, song-song and swing. But what began as an independent folk opera, played in front of small crowds in Vermont theater spaces, is now a full-length performance of the Great White Way, which has been nominated for comedy, staging, choreography and scenography, among others. Mitchell herself – the first woman in years to get the single credit of a show on Broadway – figures in the best book and Original Score categories.

Hadestown currently playing in the same theater, the Walter Kerr, which hosted Springsteen at Broadway. Mitchell was able to see this show and finally see a set of Bruce. "I had never seen her in concert before and this performance blew me away," says Mitchell, dressed in a denim jacket and blonde-white hair that makes her look more urban than downtown. "He was putting himself out of the microphone, but we could still hear him. It was really cool that it was there before us. It was like a musical world pbading from the torch. "

This torch pbad, however, took a while. The musicals based on pop songs that are not on the program are now part of the Broadway landscape, but few have a history of extended origin like that of Hadestown. Having grown up in Vermont in the 80s, Mitchell, 38, had been drawn into the legends of heaven and hell from the dark Hades and singing Orpheus singing and playing the guitar The book of Greek myths by D'Aulaires.

"It's a tragic story that was prepared for the Hollywood ending and you do not get it," she says of the basic story. "This mystery has brought people back again and again. There is something about this that seems real, about the fragility of man. "

His father – Don Mitchell, novelist, teacher and builder of environmentally friendly homes – was often looking forward to the "Europa" of 1977, instrumental to Santana ("he explained to me that it was a musical representation of this myth "), and Mitchell, who grew up On Bob Dylan of his parents, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell records, was also caught with Steely Dan's" Home at Last ", a distorted version of Greek mythology.

Mitchell studied violin at school and, like many aspiring singer-songwriters, quickly migrated to the guitar. A graduate in political science from Middlebury College, Vermont, in 2004, Mitchell, inspired by her hero performer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, made an indie folk album. But as a sign of her nascent ambition, she also began to contemplate a conceptual piece built around the mythological characters she had previously spoken of. She updated the framework of the Depression era, which allowed her to integrate a wide range of American music (jazz, folk, New Orleans swing) and touch cultural and cultural currents. policies such as the Dust Bowl storms of the 1930s ("a vintage version of what we now see with climate change").

The project was also influenced by the re-election of George W. Bush. "I still remember that moment," she says. "The first time, I thought maybe it was a coincidence, but the second time, I thought, 'Maybe that's what this country wants and who this country is. Hadestown became a mix of me as an idealistic activist coming out of school, then hitting the reality of the world and seeing this guy being elected again and knowing how deep the corruption was. All of these elements exist in Hadestown – about this naïve artist and is it possible that art can change the world? "

Such thoughts and some first songs emerged from the first version of Hadestown. The original title was A crack in the wall, but after writing the song "Way Down Hadestown," Mitchel realized that one of those words would make a better title. To fund her project, she applied for a local arts grant and, to her surprise, received a few thousand dollars. "I had some songs but I did not concentrate on the project until I asked for this grant," she says. "And then I said to myself:" Fuck, I have to write this opera now! "

With friends from the artistic community of Montpellier, Vermont, Mitchell stages the first version of Hadestown in 2006 in theaters with a hundred seats in the cities of Barre and Vergennes; Mitchell herself played at Eurydice. The staging was exhausted – think about these phone cords – and the show had fewer songs and more instruments than today.

"We felt like we were doing something from scratch in the middle of nowhere, and the audience was hanging on to what was happening in the plot," he said. she says. "It was just a group of friends coming together and we managed to get there with very little money and very little time." The following year, she and her troupe made an improvisational musical at the event. a seven-day tour of ten Vermont cities. and a bit of Mbadachusetts, schlepping costumes and instruments.

Mitchell herself stopped playing in the show after 2007: "I have always been more ambitious as a writer than as an interpreter. I like this idea of ​​writing a song for someone else to make it famous or to write a song so good that no one knows who wrote it. but everyone knows it.

I do not know what awaits us Hadestownshe chose to turn it into an album. (Jesus Christ Superstar, which also started as a record, but which was heading towards the stage, followed a similar path.) A sum of a few thousand dollars raised through a first version of crowdfunding – send an email to its fan base and ask them to participate in exchange for T-shirts and other items – Mitchell worked on the audio version of Hadestown since more than a year. At that time, she had already met DiFranco, who had signed it under her label Righteous Babe and released Mitchell's second album, The luminosity, in 2007.

The connection had begun when DiFranco had caught a Mitchell concert in Buffalo. "I thought this girl had something," says DiFranco, who quickly learned Hadestown as well as. "This was not as developed as today, but the basic songs were there and I thought:" Good songs, dude – this girl does it. & # 39; So, I was behind. " DiFranco became one of the guest singers of the Hadestown album, with Justin Vernon from Bon Iver. (Mitchell had been playing for Bon Iver during a European tour and, one night well watered, had the courage to ask Vernon to contribute to the recording.) To make sure to be able to sing on Mitchell put his record on his hard drive. car and drove to New Orleans, to record DiFranco, and Wisconsin, to Vernon.

Thanks to his guests and the elaborate arrangements that included cabaret, pop choir and jazz, Hadestown shined like never before on the record. The story might have ended there, but in 2012, Mitchell met director Rachel Chavkin and the two men began working on the screening of the show, resulting in the creation of additional songs and dialogues.

"I wanted to go further and I was looking for a way to do it," Mitchell said. "Rachel is fierce and I remember one of the first workshops where I told Rachel," I've been working on this project for six years, "and she said," You're going to have to find a way to go from the front. And I was like, & # 39; Whoa! & # 39; And that was true. I still needed the wind in my sails. "

After an Off-Broadway tour at the New York Theater Workshop in 2016, the idea for Broadway was launched and Mitchell did not deter this idea. "I did not know how much I wanted this until they said it," she says. "I said," God, yes. "The idea of ​​putting this strange story and music in front of more people was something I wanted to try."

Commitments in Edmonton, Canada and London followed, and Mitchell and Chavkin tinkered almost to the end. Compared to these primitive representations more than a decade ago, the show that began on Broadway in April was almost double the number of songs, intermission and more elaborate staging, though the arrangements remain true to the small acoustic sensation of the acoustic orchestras of the first days. of the show (formulated by arrangers Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose).

Hadestown also has a new moment of resonance in the sentence "Why we build the wall", that Hades (played by Patrick Page) sings to rally his team of the underworld. The 2016 Off-Broadway season of the show coincided with Trump's campaign and Mitchell realized that the lyrics of the song – "The Wall Protects the Enemy / And We're Building the Wall to Keep Us Free" That's why we're building the wall "- suddenly agreed with" Build This Wall "crying at Trump rallies. This strange bond only got stronger during Trump's presidency. "I never expected her to feel as relevant as today," she says. "I'm not the first person to write a song on a wall. Pink Floyd has one. People asked, "Have I started to adapt the show after the Trump administration?" I never wanted to do that. "

Mitchell adds, "In addition, Hades is not an badet. Hades is for me a much more interesting character.

Mitchell no longer records for Righteous Babe, he went under another independent label, but DiFranco remains a supporter of Mitchell and attended the opening night of the show. "I'm really impressed by the patience and maturity that Anaïs has shown in bringing this project to over a decade of development," said DiFranco. "I do not think I've had that kind of maturity at his age."

Faithful to her outer roots, Mitchell, who lives with her husband and daughter in Brooklyn, does not plan on following a follow-up musical. After working on Hadestown for more than 10 years, she turned to music again for her next project. With singer Eric D. Johnson and guitarist Josh Kaufman, a recurring member of the band Josh Ritter, she formed a band, Bonny Light Horseman, and creates an album of songs at the root of British folk, a genre she has discovered in his 2013 album Child ballads. This time, the songs are a mix of traditional and original, with arrangements that extend the thickness of the previous record. People keep asking me [a new musical]but I would make records and songs solo, "she says. "It's good to be back in the world of music."

On the horizon much more immediate are the Tonys. Mitchell has not yet outlined what she could have said in 90 seconds that winners are allowed on stage. Given the long gestation of Hadestown, the list of people Mitchell could thank for having promised to be voluminous, so she alternates between her husband's suggestion (talk about climate change, another underlying theme of the series) and the novices likely to watch.

"We received advice from a Tony candidate," said Mitchell, "who said," There is not much time and there are too many people to thank for the Thank you all, "so I can think of that Akron child who is in the high school theater program and is looking at the Tonys. What do they need to hear?