PMA Ph.D. candidate Andy Colpitts has published an article called “On The Road to Hell/Broadway: The Rural to Urban Development of Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown" in the inaugural issue of MusicTheatreDance. Colpitts’ article is available to read here.
“My personal experience as a fan of Hadestown was at the heart of this project,” said Colpitts. “I first discovered the musical in high school with the 2010 concept album, and it remains to this day one of my favorite pieces of theatre. As I saw productions of it at various moments on its journey to Broadway, I was fascinated by—and at times critical of—the ways it changed as it grew in scale. This made me think about the ways new play (and new musical) development is shaped by geographic identities and norms, particularly the focus on getting to Broadway. I wanted to tell the story of this musical in a way that gave proper credence to its rural origins, even as it aimed at metropolitan acclaim.
“I began writing this piece in a seminar on Border Environments with Debra Castillo and Anindita Banerjee and later revised it for presentation at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) in 2023 for the MusicTheatreDance working group under the mentorship of Dr. Donatella Gallela, which then led to its publication in the MusicTheatreDance Journal. During the time between presentation and publication, a teen-edition Hadestown became available for schools to produce, which included schools in Vermont, where the musical began. In the final version of this article, I drew in this story to think about Hadestown's development not as a one-way road to Broadway, but as a round-trip.
“What I want readers to take away from this is an appreciation for the ways rural community theaters and rural professional theaters are intimately intertwined, challenging the stereotype that cities are where real theatre happens.”
Read more about Andy Colpitts’ work: https://pma.cornell.edu/andy-colpitts
