5 minute read
From the Underworld and Back
ARTS&LIFE
THEATER
Advertisement
PHOTO BY T CHARLES ERICKSON
From the Underworld and Back
Hadestown comes to Michigan for two stops.
JULIE SMITH YOLLES CONTRIBUTING WRITER
On March 12, 2020, the day that Broadway shut down, Bex Odorisio was in final rehearsals for the world premiere opening of The Visitor at the Public Theater in New York City. She also had a callback for the North American tour of Hadestown.
One year later, Odorisio got an email that Hadestown was going to be the first musical to resume on Broadway on Sept. 2, and begin its tour on Oct. 13, and would she audition again.
“That was quite a surprise; I didn’t expect shows to be up and running yet. So I did a video audition from my living room. It was very surreal,” says Odorisio, who is now on her first Broadway tour featured as a Fate in Hadestown.
Hadestown comes to Detroit’s Fisher Theatre Nov. 23-Dec. 5 followed by performances at the Wharton Center in East Lansing from Dec. 7-12. Hadestown is the winner of eight 2019 Tony Awards, including Best New Musical and the 2020 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. It was also honored with four Drama Desk Awards, six Outer Critics Circle Awards, including Outstanding New Broadway Musical, and the Drama League Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical.
Hadestown is helmed by a dynamic female production team spearheaded by music, lyrics and book writer Anaïs Mitchell; and Jewish director Rachel Chavkin.
“Rachel Chavkin describes the Fates as a ‘supergroup’ where we have standout solo moments, but we also meet in harmony on the same level,” says Odorisio, who’s onstage with two other Fates for the majority of the show.
“We are pulled straight from Greek mythology as the controllers of the lives of mortals and sometimes gods,” she adds. “We embody the fears and impulses. If we’re not actively meddling, we’re actively observing so that we can meddle later.”
Hadestown weaves together two love stories — of the young Orpheus and Eurydice — with King Hades and his
— BEX ODORISIO
Shea Renne, Bex Odorisio, and Belén Moyano in the Hadestown North American Tour at Detroit’s Fisher Theatre Nov. 23-Dec. 5 and East Lansing’s Wharton Center Dec. 7-12.
DETAILS
Hadestown runs Nov. 23-Dec. 5 at the Fisher Theatre in Detroit and from Dec. 7-12 at the Wharton Center in East Lansing. Tickets for Hadestown at the Fisher Theatre start at $59 and can be purchased www.ticketmaster.com. Tickets for Dec. 7-12 at the Wharton Center may be purchased by visiting www.whartoncenter.com.
Theater patrons will be required to show proof of a negative COVID test within 72 hours of the performance date or proof of full COVID-19 vaccination before they will be admitted into the venue. Additionally, all patrons will be required to wear a mask while inside the theater, regardless of one’s vaccination status.
wife Persephone — set against a poetically lyrical score of American folk, New Orleans jazz and blues. Mitchell describes Hadestown as “somewhere between a concert and a theater show.”
Odorisio, whose mother is Jewish and whose father is Italian, grew up in the large Jewish area of Ardmore, Pa., where she and her two sisters were all bat mitzvahed. Growing up, they celebrated all of the holidays, including enjoying the Italian tradition of the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve and eating Chinese food and going to the movies on Christmas Day.
Four years ago, Odorisio got a ukulele for Chanukah. With her mission to becoming a proficient ukulele player, Odorisio took in-person lessons in Brooklyn and then continued on Zoom during the pandemic. Now the owner of three different ukuleles, Odorisio travels with her concert ukulele on tour and keeps it in her dressing room.
“Once I finish my makeup, I strum a little before the show. It’s very relaxing and gets me in the right frame of mind,” she says.
For her Hadestown audition, Odorisio played the ukulele to showcase her musicality since all the Fates play instruments onstage during the performance.
On some tour stops, Odorisio’s boyfriend brings her pit bull, Gusto, for a visit.
Odorisio promises Detroiters: “You’ll want to come see Hadestown because you’ve never seen anything like it before.”
JAY SAPER continued from page 49
— JAY SAPER
eventually, Saper says, the town’s library was built on the spot of his great uncle’s plant, with no mention of the Jewish business that had stood there. Saper aims to keep this legacy alive through his art.
NEW YORK YEARS
After college, Saper studied progressive childhood education at Bank Street College in Manhattan. This was followed by teaching children at different progressive schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as being involved in organizing and political projects. He joined Park Slope Kolot Chayeinu, a progressive Jewish community.
“In addition to my work as a letterpress printer, I am also a papercut artist,” he says. “I created papercuts, a traditional Jewish folk art, to honor the remarkable, overlooked stories of Jewish women in the resistance to the Nazis. My work was published as the chapter ‘Fighting Fascists with Folk Art’ in Cindy Milstein’s There’s Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart: Mending the World as Jewish Anarchists (AK Press 2021).”
Another papercut project combined several of his interests. He wrote a zine called Radical Village, a history of the Little Red Schoolhouse and Elizabeth Irwin High School (LREI) founded in 1921 in Greenwich Village, the families associated with it and its connections to social movements over the past century. He became interested in the school’s history before he worked there and was drawn to its Jewish beginnings.
“LREI was a hotbed of Jewish radicalism,” he says. “The school’s first students were Yiddish-speaking immigrants on the Lower East Side. The school served as a haven for politically active Jewish teachers and families who faced state repression and violence. The school was a cultural center for experimental and progressive Jewish artists.”
As he dug into the history of the school, he decided to create a walking tour of Greenwich Village that highlighted some of the school’s famous students (Angela Davis, the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and more), supporters of the school and events in the school’s history. The zine, with its papercuts, became a companion piece to the tour.
Now that he’s back in East Lansing, he is restoring his traditional letterpress and creating wood type, teaching online, embracing Jewish cultural art traditions and doing his part to keep alive the spirit of progressive social activism so prevalent in generations of Jews before him.
