Anaïs Mitchell on her musical Hadestown: 'I worked on it so long I was afraid I'd never make another record'
Musicals are a notorious way to suck up long periods of your life. They take a great deal of time to develop, but Hadestown – the biggest musical to open in the West End so far this year, based loosely on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice – really has been a long and winding road. Its creator Anaïs Mitchell has been working on it, in some form, for two decades.
It doesn't seem to have taken it's toll. “The crazy thing about living with this show is that it has kept on giving,” the musician-turned-musical theatre writer says when we meet, sounding remarkably lucid for someone who got off a transatlantic flight just a few hours before.
Looking back at Hadestown's long and winding road to the West End – which begun with one song when she was a gigging folk musician and included a run at the National Theatre before scooping an armload of Tony awards for its run on Broadway – Mitchell says, “I think it took so long because I didn’t know what I was doing or getting into. I
