“I’m so freaking proud of it,” said director Rachel Chavkin. She’s referring to the final cut of the film “Hadestown: The Musical,” a proshot capture of the 2019 Tony Award-winning Best Musical. Chavkin helmed “Hadestown” in its Off-Broadway, London, Canadian, Broadway and touring productions as well as its London remount — winning a Tony Award for her direction. Now she adds the “Hadestown” film to that list of iterations, having directed it alongside filmmaker Brett Sullivan of Steam Motion and Sound. Chavkin gushed, “I’m so excited, it’s come out so beautiful.”
The movie debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 8 and will be released in North American cinemas beginning on July 24. The capture reunited the five original Broadway principals — Reeve Carney as Orpheus, Andre De Shields as Hermes, Amber Gray as Persephone, Eva Noblezada as Eurydice and Patrick Page as Hades — and combined them with the Fates, ensemblists and onstage band of the current London production, running at the Lyric Theatre.
This hybrid company played a four-week limited engagement at the Lyric from Feb. 11 through March 9, 2025, during which Chavkin, Sullivan and their teams filmed across three live performances and a three and a half days of closed shoots (for certain setups requiring a camera that would have gotten in the way of the live audience view).
Chavkin specifically chose Sullivan and his company Steam when it came to choosing her film partners. “I just think that Steam is pretty singular in terms of their imagination and how they capture live theater,” Chavkin said. Steam’s status and quality come from more than a decade of specializing in theater captures. Having started as a company focused on music promotion and music video production, Steam transitioned to shooting theater — first for commercials and then as full-length captures — when producer David Stone contacted the company to film and create a commercial for a German production of “Wicked.” “Then the calls just started coming in,” Sullivan told Broadway News. In 2014, Sullivan captured “Billy Elliot The Musical” and “Love Never Dies” via Steam and has since been the film director for “Newsies,” “Waitress: The Musical,” Disney’s “Frozen: The Hit Broadway Musical” and others.
