The Torrance High Performing Arts Dept.
is inviting ALL students to audition for
HADESTOWN

TEEN EDITION

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Winner of Eight 2019 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Score and Best Orchestrations

Winner of Four 2019 Drama Desk Awards

Winner of Six 2019 Outer Critics Circle Awards, including Outstanding New Broadway Musical

Winner of 2019 Drama League Award for Outstanding Production of a Musical

Winner of 2020 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album​

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Vocals: Wednesday, January 7 3:30-7pm
Dance: Thursday, January 8 3:30-7pm
Callbacks: Friday, January 9 3:30-7pm

 

We will not be evaluating monologues for Hadestown: Teen Edition. As the piece is a sung-through folk opera, performers will be expected to showcase emotion and storytelling in both their vocal and dance auditions. 

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• Sides & Music

• Audition Form (required by all who audition)

• In Person Audition Sign Up (required if auditioning in person @ THS)

• Video auditions must be emailed to hovis.darryl@tusd.org  by Sunday, January 4th at 10pm.

​​ABOUT HADESTOWN

 This intriguing and beautiful folk opera delivers a deeply resonant and defiantly hopeful theatrical experience. Following two intertwining love stories – that of young dreamers Orpheus and Eurydice, and that of immortal King Hades and lady Persephone – Hadestown invites audiences on a hell-raising journey to the underworld and back. Inspired by traditions of classic American folk music and vintage New Orleans jazz, Mitchell’s beguiling sung-through musical pits industry against nature, doubt against faith, and fear against love.

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GREEK ORIGINS ​​

In Greek mythology,  the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice concerns the pitiful love of Orpheus for his wife Eurydice. The subject is among the most frequently retold of all Greek myths.

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Apollo gave Orpheus a lyre and taught him how to play. It had been said that "nothing could resist Orpheus's beautiful melodies, neither enemies nor beasts." Orpheus fell in love with Eurydice, a woman of beauty and grace, whom he married and lived with happily for a short time, until one day Eurydice was bitten by a snake and died instantly.

Orpheus sang his grief with his lyre and affected everyone - both humans and gods - by the depths of his sorrow and grief.

Orpheus decided to descend to the god of the Greek underworld, Hades, by music, to see his wife there. Any other mortal would have died, but being protected by the gods, Orpheus arrived and presented himself in front of Hades and his wife, Persephone.

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Orpheus played with his lyre a song so heartbreaking that even Hades himself was moved to compassion. Hades told Orpheus that he could take Eurydice back with him, but under two conditions: she would have to walk behind him while they traveled out of the caves of the underworld, and he could not turn back to look at her as they walked.

Thinking it a simple task for a patient man like himself, Orpheus was delighted; he thanked Hades and left to ascend back into the living world. Unable to hear Eurydice's footsteps, however, he began to fear the gods had fooled him. Only a few feet away from the exit, Orpheus lost his faith and turned to see Eurydice behind him, sending her back to be trapped in Hades's reign forever.

Orpheus tried to return to the underworld but was unable to, possibly because a person cannot enter the realm of Hades twice while alive. He played a mourning song with his lyre, calling for death so that he could be united with Eurydice forever. ​

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ORIGINS OF THE MUSICAL​​

Hadestown is a musical adaptation of the Greek myth, with music, lyrics, and a book by Anaïs Mitchell.

Writer Anaïs Mitchell said she was inspired by Les Misérables to write a musical that was about the power of both romance and politics.​

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Director Rachel Chavkin said addressing climate change had always been central to the show: "As we thought more and more about shaping the world that Eurydice and Orpheus are living in — a world caused, in Greek mythological terms, by the decay of the ancient marriage between Hades and Persephone, a world that is out of balance, where it is either freezing or blazing hot, where food becomes scarcer and the idea of stability becomes harder to imagine, and a character, Eurydice, who has spent her life running – all of those things kind of crystallized while we were making the show." The show did a joint promotion with Natural Resources Defense Council to raise awareness and bring a greater sense of urgency to the push for action on the issue of climate change.

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In this version,  Orpheus is a poor singer-songwriter, and Eurydice is a vulnerable runaway who chooses security over love and art, driven by hunger and the cold of a perpetual winter. She accepts Hades' offer of eternal work for food and shelter, making a calculated decision to survive despite the risks. Hades is depicted as a powerful, capitalist figure who rules the underworld as a mining baron, building his wealth from the underground resources of the factory town and his oppressed and enslaved working class. 

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US cultural commentator Bridget Read highlights the economic themes: "Orpheus and Eurydice's tragedy becomes, in the hands of Mitchell, an argument for collective bargaining... the characters sing the word poverty more times than I've ever heard it before in the vicinity of Times Square." 

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Todd Osborne comments on the self-conscious significance of the medium of song within the work: "It is a musical both about how art can save us and how, especially in an apocalyptic world, hope might be the only thing we have left."

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BROADWAY 

The original sung-through version of the musical was performed in Vermont in 2006. Mitchell, unsure about the future of the musical, turned it into a concept album, released in 2010.

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In 2012, Mitchell met director Rachel Chavkin, and the two reworked the stage version, with additional songs and dialogue. The new version of the musical premiered off-Broadway in 2016. The show premiered on Broadway in 2019, receiving critical acclaim. At the 73rd Tony Awards, Hadestown received 14 nominations (the most that year) and won eight, including Best Musical.  

On January 4, 2023, Hadestown became the longest-running show at the Walter Kerr Theatre with 918 performances.

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