The ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is about as old as stories get. A musician descends into the underworld to rescue the woman he loves. He is given one condition: walk out without looking back to see if she is following him. Just before completing the challenge, he becomes doubtful, looks back, and sees her for the last time.
“Hadestown” turns that story into a folk opera set in something like the American Depression, scored to New Orleans jazz and Appalachian folk music. Its underworld is a factory, where the working class are chewed up and spit out. On Saturday night, more than 2,000 people packed into the sold-out and aptly name Orpheum Theatre on Market Street to watch it.
There was something democratic about the experience. Everyone paid to sit in the room and watch it unfold. No one got every actor’s facial expression; no one was spared a blocked view. In that sense, it wasn’t so different from ancient Greece — just with electric lights. And unlike the play, everyone shared the same fate.
That feeling is harder to come by in San Francisco than it used to be — and harder to sustain. The Bay Area’s theater scene has thinned in recent years: dozens of companies have shut down since 2020, audiences haven’t fully returned, and the cost of putting on shows has climbed sharply.
What remains is more fragile, more expensive, and more dependent on big touring productions like “Hadestown” to fill large houses. On nights like this, though, the crowd is as energized as ever.
The attendees, most of whom seemed younger than 40, had dressed for the occasion, wearing costumes inspired by the show and roses pinned to their lapels — a nod to Persephone and spring — as they took selfies outside the theater before the show.
Kat C., a teenager from Castro Valley attending with her parents, all three wearing roses, called the show “very relevant to what’s happening politically,” especially in the region. To her, it is plainly a story about oligarchy. “It’s about having to work a minimum-wage job your whole life,” she said. “Hades knows he’s taking advantage of people.”
Anaïs Mitchell’s interpretation makes the underworld a place of metaphorical death. Eurydice, in an attempt to escape her impoverished life, signs a contract with Hades and goes to work for him. Orpheus, willing to sacrifice everything, follows her down. The crowd gasped when Orpheus turned around, even if they saw it coming.
People were still wiping their eyes as the story reset, imagining an alternate ending where springtime lasts forever, and where all can live free of contracts and hunger. It offers, briefly, the possibility that the world could be a different place.
As the crowd spilled out onto Market Street — couples new and long-established — they debated the same questions: Was Orpheus wrong to turn? What does it say about love, or about trust, or about the meaning of life? It’s a scenario that could never happen under the laws of the real world, and yet it feels uncomfortably close to it.
The ambiguity lingered in a tech-centered city that so often insists on binary solutions.
Christian Knopf, a 35-year-old videographer, stood smoking outside after the show. The “Hadestown” soundtrack had been his favorite for years, but the performance left him visibly shaken.
“There are no words,” he said, nearly frozen in place. “Every single piece of it was flawless.”
What made it work, he said, was that it refused to choose between being a love story and a critique of capitalism. As for Orpheus turning back — checking whether the thing that mattered most was still there — Knopf didn’t blame him.
“To not turn back would have been foolish,” he said, “even if it is the end of it all.”
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