When Anaïs Mitchell first heard the chorus of “Wait for Me” drop into her lap during a long nighttime drive between gigs, she had no idea it would grow into a Tony-winning Broadway phenomenon—and eventually fill cinema walls with gods and goddesses larger than life. In an exclusive conversation with AMFM Magazine’s Paul Salfen, the creator of Hadestown reflects on the long, collaborative road from a DIY Vermont folk opera to the newly released film Hadestown: The Musical, a live capture that immortalizes Rachel Chavkin’s visionary staging and the original Broadway principals for audiences who may never make it to the theater.
“I’m so excited that the world is going to get to see this work,” Mitchell tells Salfen. Hadestown has been evolving for a long time. The show opened on Broadway in 2019 and a cast recording made the music widely available, but the full theatrical experience—the world Chavkin created with her design team and the five principal actors—remained out of reach for many. “Now… these performers [are]going to be, immortalized for folks to see who wouldn’t otherwise get to see it in the theater. So I’m really thrilled.”
Mitchell recently saw the film on the big screen for the first time at a private friends-and-family screening in New York. The experience felt almost sacred. “It does feel like that. It feels like a miracle pretty much start to finish… smell the popcorn and… take the escalator up to the theater and then see these performers literally larger than life.” The Greek mythology is already larger than life, she notes—gods and goddesses—but watching them fill an entire cinema wall while the music hit at that scale was something new. “I saw it with new eyes.”
The seeds of the show were planted years earlier, when Mitchell was still an emerging singer-songwriter. “I was driving between two gigs, like a really long nighttime drive, and what is now the chorus of ‘Wait for Me’ kind of just dropped into my lap… and it seemed to be about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, which is one that I just always loved as a kid.” Writing the show in her twenties, she felt a deep identification with Orpheus. “I was like an idealistic kind of creative person coming out of college, coming up against the real world… Orpheus was sort of an avatar for that. He’s an idealist. He’s a dreamer. He believes if he could make something beautiful enough, he could change the rules of the world.”
That belief has always been tempered by a sense of lineage. Retelling a Greek myth means stepping into a long tradition. “I think of myself as following in other people’s footsteps too… this is an ancient story that’s been told hundreds of times, and it just felt like it’s my turn.” Making a musical was new territory for Mitchell, and she emphasizes how collaborative the process must be. “It requires a room full of artists, all with different kind of specialties working together, and the camaraderie of that and the joy of that is something that… I don’t think is kind of unparalleled for me in my creative life.”
Her advice to other artists is both practical and generous: “Allow your collaborators to kind of keep the wind in your sails. And then I think you just have to put one foot in front of the other, and you just have to put the work in. Ideas are one thing. And then the fruition of them requires so much kind of unglamorous elbow grease.”
That elbow grease began in the most DIY way imaginable. Living in Vermont, Mitchell received a small arts grant to write a folk opera. She booked a hall, put tickets on sale, and only then finished writing the show. “I put tickets on sale for a show that wasn’t even written yet… That was like an early 20s move. But at some level you have to kind of create opportunities for yourself to rise to. So that was a Mary moment—to put the tickets on sale for the show that didn’t exist.”
Motherhood has since reshaped her creative life in grounding ways. “I have a couple kids now. They provide major context to my life as an artist and as a human. My time is more limited creatively. And actually, I think that that can be really healthy… They keep me humble… They don’t care what’s going on on the silver screen or on Broadway. They just care about, like, can I get a snack in the next room for my play date.”
For audiences encountering Hadestown for the first time on film, Mitchell hopes they lean into its sung-through nature. “There’s no break in the spell… the spell is cast, and then you just get to live in this rarefied world of music for the whole show. I hope people allow themselves to get kind of immersed in that… and let it carry them away.” Though the story is a great tragedy, “the telling of it is very joyful. And it’s about community storytelling. It’s about togetherness. It’s about perseverance in the face of difficulty… I hope people feel that kind of resilience and community spirit. And just like I hope they… want to move their bodies.”
After years focused on her folk-rock band Bonny Light Horseman, Mitchell is once again deep in theater. She’s developing a new play with music she won’t discuss yet—“to not jinx it”—but the obsession feels familiar. “I am so grateful to be working in the theater again, and also to feel kind of obsessed with the thing, the way I remember feeling about Hadestown.”
From a song that arrived unbidden on a dark highway to a film that makes mythic figures larger than life, Mitchell’s journey with Hadestown remains a testament to the power of putting one foot in front of the other—and occasionally selling tickets to a show that doesn’t yet exist.
