If you’re a musical theater composer, it’s a bit of a flex to write songs for Orpheus, the figure of Greek myth whose melodies were so beautiful they tamed savage beasts and brought inanimate objects to life.
In the Tony Award-winning musical fusing myths about two couples — Orpheus and Eurydice; Hades and Persephone — her hypnotic airs climb, lope and flutter. Jazzy, folky instrumentation, with what has to be the hardest-working trombonist in any musical theater orchestra pit, gives the freewheeling, bang-on-a-can feel of a junkyard outside Hades’ underground foundry.
As the two women try, and fail, to get what they need from their male partners, Mitchell’s lyrics seem applicable to everything from climate change to war to immigration.
“The enemy is poverty, and the wall keeps out the enemy, and we build the wall to keep us free,” states a line in the Hades number “Why We Build the Wall.”
Rachel Chavkin directs the show, which tours to ATG San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre.