Lady Business: Hadestown and Hollywood, Broadway and Paris

Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the sixty-fifth issue, published April 18, 2019.
 

Fates, Furies, and Fires 

 
I’ve been thinking about the stunning new Broadway musical Hadestown pretty much nonstop since seeing it last weekend. Its feminist retelling of twinned Greek myths -- Hades and Persephone, Orpheus and Eurydice -- isn’t perfect, but is masterful: The jawdroppingly cinematic staging and lighting! The dystopian-steampunk-Depression setting and costumes! The female-gaze choreography and clothing of its (fantastic, inclusively cast) chorus! The feminist, folksy-jazz retelling of two misogynist Greek myths, based on a concept album that songwriter and composer Anais Mitchell starting writing thirteen years ago! The powerhouse voices of its leads, especially Eva Noblezada and Amber Gray! (Not to mention: Gold star for the theater’s unusually great women’s bathrooms.)
 
The story sticks more or less to the major beats of its origin myths, though it gives Persephone and Eurydice much more agency -- and, thankfully, much less rape and death-by-snakebite. (Despite a sly couple of “rattlesnake” allusions, this practical Eurydice chooses her own fate.) Which brings to mind my other favorite feminist retelling of the Eurydice story, in Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, her 1999 collection of poems written from the points of view of famous misses and mistresses:
 

And, given my time all over again,
I know that I’d rather write for myself
than be dearest, beloved, dark lady, white goddess, etc. etc.
In fact, girls, I’d rather be dead.
But the Gods are like publishers –
usually male –
and what you doubtless know of my tale
is the deal.

 
Which brings us to the important, frustrating business story at the heart of Hadestown’s excellence. With an all-female creative team and a female lead producer, Hadestown is the only new Broadway musical this season directed by a woman. The only one! It’s also the only new Broadway musical this season with a score written for the theater by a woman. And it’s not like Broadway is an outlier; in Hollywood, women still direct less than 10 percent of big studio movies, The New York Times reminded us this week. And as Game of Thrones slogs and sexes its way towards its breathlessly-anticipated finale, TV journalist Maureen Ryan points out that the series “has only ever had ONE female director *ever* A grand total of 2 women have ever written for the show. All 3 women are white.”
 
Rachel Chavkin -- the Tony-nominated, Times-profile-worthy directing genius who spent years working with Mitchell to bring Hadestown to Broadway -- has been getting some headlines for her rare position as Broadway’s Only Lady Director this year, and sounds understandably irritated about the situation:
 

I would say probably one of the biggest misconceptions from producers is that directing on Broadway is a prerequisite for directing on Broadway. I have not found that to be the case. If you know how to run a tech Off-Broadway for a big musical then you know how to run a tech on Broadway for a musical. I think it’s a really damaging misconception because it keeps reinforcing the majority of white male directors who are trusted with money on quote unquote “this risk averse forum.”
 
… I think there will be progress when there’s at least one, if not ten, years to rival the [past] 100, when every director is a female or person of color. Then we’ll be ready for a year where you get to ask a white man how it feels to be the only white man to be directing on Broadway.

 
In that same (terrific, extensive) joint interview with The Interval, Mitchell points out something that’s also true for women entrepreneurs seeking money from investors, who still – yep, still! Still. -- give 98 percent of all venture money to men. If you’re a woman looking for an investor to back your idea, ask another woman instead:
 

We do have two female lead producers who have been really so supportive and I think it probably does take more producers who are women to trust women with money.

 
Hadestown, which opened last night, has gotten generally rave reviews, strong ticket sales, and awards buzz. I hesitate to compare it to that other H-triple-syllabic Broadway juggernaut, but the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout went there: “After ‘Hamilton,’ ‘Hadestown’ is the best new musical on Broadway, period.”

And there’s a part of me -- the part that’s both business reporter and feminist, the part that writes this newsletter -- that wants to see Hadestown get all the breakout fame and critical adulation and financial success of Hamilton. That’s not to knock Hamilton, which I loved (and have the credit card bills to prove it). But now I want to see Hadestown get the well-deserved praise for its deliberately inclusive casting and radically revisionist storytelling (where it easily surpasses Hamilton’s two halves of interesting female characters. And it’s worth noting that Hadestown’s female leads are Greek heroines both played by women of color.)
 
I want the exegeses, and the magazine covers, and the Tony-Grammy-Oscar love, and the pop-culture anointing of Mitchell and Chavkin as creative geniuses. I want to see this female-created, female-centric piece of entertainment take over Game of Thrones’ role in the monoculture. I want Mike Pence or Ivanka to show up at a performance, to make some sort of statement about coastal elites, to hear Patrick Page’s dictator thunder out “Why We Build the Wall.” (Improbably written by 2010! Which…kudos and condolences to Mitchell on foreseeing the future so clearly, I guess? It’s also amusingly on-the-nose to see a socialist “workers revolt against the demagogue” story on Broadway right now.)

Another similarity with Hamilton is in Hadestown’s ending, and how it approaches a foregone conclusion. (Spoilers, kind of, for a millennia-old story.) Like Hamilton, Hadestown frames its plot by reflecting on how the story is told and why it persists -- and what that says about memory, and grief:
 

It’s a sad song
But we sing it anyway
 
Cause, here’s the thing
To know how it ends
And still to begin to sing it again
As though it might turn out this time

 
Grief is circular. We are made happy by the memory of someone or something lost, whose absence makes us sad. The other reason that I’ve been thinking about this musical and this message so much this week is Notre Dame, and the centuries of history that we saw consumed by fire in real-time, and the happier memories that destruction immediately evoked, and overwrote.
 

I saw something like this almost daily in my early 20s, when I lived in Paris and walked home from work almost every night. I remember telling myself on those walks, casually passing through streets of impossible beauty and history and golden light, “You won’t always live here. You won’t always have this commute. Savor this, and remember it.”
 
I got a chance to recreate that walk in November, during a long layover on my way somewhere else. It was early on a chilly Saturday morning, when the streets had been cleaned but even the tourists weren’t stirring yet. I navigated the cobblestones with a heavy shoulder bag, ducking into a covered arcade and coming out near the Palais-Royal and its columns, and then the Louvre and its glass pyramids. And then I achieved the river, and its bridges, and in the distance the spire and towers of the old familiar cathedral.
 
It was time to go back to the airport. I snapped a photo down the river and hailed a cab and left again, forgetting to remind myself: Centuries of history are no guarantee. You won’t always have this. You can’t always go back, and start again.
 

Lady Bits

--"A culture willing to look the other way when there's money to be made on a proven winner." Speaking of the men that male investors back, BuzzFeed has a great, depressing, and comprehensively-reported story about how and why Silicon Valley consistently gives #MeToo men second (and third and ...) chances.
 
--Happy birthday this week to my friends Sandra and Maureen!
 
--Book Stuff: Thanks so much to Leah Glover Hayes for this fun and extensive Her Story of Success podcast conversation, about my book and Leah’s business and why I included so much advice from successful women entrepreneurs in my business book.
 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com