Hadestown Film Reunites Original Broadway Cast in London
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- Hadestown: The Musical film reunites all five original Broadway principals — Reeve Carney, Eva Noblezada, Patrick Page, André De Shields and Amber Gray — at London's Lyric Theatre, with director Brett Sullivan's capture projected at roughly $9 million in its U.S. opening weekend
- Brett Sullivan filmed across three live performances (Friday night, Saturday matinee, Saturday evening) plus closeup-only sessions without an audience, with 4–6 cameras repositioned to entirely different parts of the theater for each show, yielding what Carney calls "a 30-camera shoot"
- Anaïs Mitchell says close-ups expose emotional details — tears rolling, lips twitching — that audiences in the theater could never see, while Sullivan still cuts to wide shots of the stage and crowd to preserve the live context
- Stars Reeve Carney and Eva Noblezada, who play Orpheus and Eurydice and are now married, push back on the "tragedy" label, calling the show optimistic and designed to "empower" people to choose a different ending — a framing they credit with the show's young fanbase
- Patrick Page concedes the camera forced him to stop "cheating" moments he had faked across eight-shows-a-week runs, while André De Shields insists the actors never consciously adjusted for the cameras, sparking a playful on-record disagreement between the two
- The roughly $9 million projected opening would rank the Hadestown film behind only the Hamilton film among opening grosses for direct captures of a stage production
- A 2022 attempt to capture the show fell through because Amber Gray was about to leave the cast; the cast says the eventual London shoot, made possible during a cast changeover, gave them a "second chance" they were determined not to waste
Why it matters: The one-week theatrical window means fans either see the original Broadway five on the big screen now or wait indefinitely for a rerelease — and a roughly $9 million projected opening would put Hadestown behind only the Hamilton film among stage-capture grosses, giving Broadway-to-screen adaptations a fresh commercial benchmark and a template for reuniting casts abroad when timing at the home theater fails.
