Five years (and eight Tony Awards) after its Broadway premiere, Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell’s arresting musical retelling of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, has never sounded better. This is thanks not only to Jordan Fisher (Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Sweeney Todd) and Maia Reficco (Max’s Pretty Little Liars: Summer School), who star as the searching, hopeful, ultimately doomed young lovers from Greek mythology, but also to the resounding talents of Stephanie Mills, who joined the cast this summer as Hermes.
In a role originated by André De Shields—the Wizard to her Dorothy in the original Broadway production of The Wiz, the show that launched her career—Mills lights up the Walter Kerr Theatre like a bottle rocket, endowing the story’s de facto narrator with both a moving maternal empathy and the warmly soulful timbre that fans of her work as a recording artist know so well.