Anaïs Mitchell’s folk musical retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth is due to travel to Broadway after three months at London’s National Theatre, and its two principal antagonists have squared off against each other on the Great White Way before. However, since on that occasion Reeve Carney and Patrick Page played, respectively, the title role and the Green Goblin in the flopperoo Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, it would be best to move swiftly on.

Carney’s Orpheus here is a music-obsessed hobo in a kind of mythical Depression-era southern U.S.A.; he plays an instrument I have never seen before, a four-stringed tenor guitar, so this Orpheus is as unique as his classical original. As Hades, ruler of the underworld, Page enters looking for all the world like Dennis Hopper, and generally sings in a late-period-Leonard Cohen basso that seldom makes it above ground level itself.

Mitchell and her co-adapter, director Rachel Chavkin, cleverly weave in the story of Hades and Persephone (a commanding Amber Gray). Consequently, Orpheus’s climactic, irresistible song (less irresistible once I realised after the show its annoying resemblance to Chris De Burgh’s “A Spaceman Came Travelling”) is no longer simple grief for Eurydice but about the other couple’s initial love which has now waned. In its aftermath, the earth is now stricken and the underworld one massive heavy-industrial plant... thus also incorporating a humanity / machinery opposition. There is even an uncomfortably topical resonance to the Act One finale “Why We Build The Wall” (why would the underworld need one? – Answer: “We build the wall to keep us free”), although in fact this song was already in place when Mitchell first showcased Hadestown in album form in 2010.

Eva Noblezada has a strong voice as Eurydice and carries several numbers, but inevitably ends up as much slighter a figure beside Orpheus as Noblezada is beside Carney. The remaining principal figure is the god Hermes, who acts as narrator and master of ceremonies. André De Shields is magnetic, every bit as compelling as Morgan Freeman’s preacher in the original Broadway version of that other classical-myth musical The Gospel At Colonus, which the opening minutes of this show recall somewhat.

As well as folk and gospel, Mitchell’s songs incorporate elements of blues, New Orleans jazz and rock in its broadest sense, although the seven-piece band (augmented instrumentally by Hades’ sidekick Fates) is entirely acoustic. The lyrics and book (it is indistinguishable and irrelevant where the one component ends and the other begins) are, however, less impressive, falling almost unremittingly into loose tetrameters, loosely rhymed in couplets or loose quatrains. Yet a similar looseness becomes a virtue in Chavkin’s direction. She creates a feeling of organic freedom, whether real or a deft illusion, similar to that in her work with the adventurous TEAM company. Even though there is little ultimate sense of climax or payoff, the journey of the story is both enjoyable and engaging... which, as Hermes concludes, is in one respect the whole point of retelling any familiar tale.

Written for the Financial Times.