Producer Mara Isaacs Gives the Inside Scoop and More in HADESTOWN at Citadel Theatre

Hadestown, the electrifying new musical destined for Broadway, is coming to Citadel Theatre November 11 to December 3. The Citadel partnered with Octopus Theatricals, an American company dedicated to producing and consulting in the performing arts, to bring the show to Edmonton. Mara Isaacs, founder of Octopus Theatricals, has been involved with Hadestown for five years now, and produced the popular Off-Broadway version at New York Theatre Workshop in 2016. Isaacs gives the Citadel Theatre's Sydnee Bryant the inside scoop about how she knew the show was a sure-fire thing during one of her recent trips to Edmonton to watch Hadestown rehearsals.

Citadel Theatre: You have a BA in Medical Anthropology from Berkley. What led you to theatre production?

Mara Isaacs: Growing up, I had gone to theatre; my parents were avid theatre goers - music, dance, theatre, everything. I was being trained as a vocalist. I sang in choirs; I had private study. I was very serious about my singing. When I got to college, I decided it was time to get serious about my life. And I knew that while music was very important to me, it wasn't going to be the focus of my career. So I started singing in some extra-curricular singing groups just for fun.

Meanwhile, I was a very serious student. I pursued all kinds of interesting academic enquiries while I was an undergraduate. But, at night, I'd go to rehearsal. Then, I started organizing the concert events because someone had to do it. Then, I started managing the groups because someone had to do it. Then, I volunteered for someone who was running an amateur musical theatre company and, after about a year, she left and I took over the company. All the while, I was not doing this as a career - this was just for fun. By the time I graduated, I was running the musical theatre company, I was managing a chamber choir that was about to go tour the Soviet Union, and I was going to take a little time off before going to graduate school in either anthropology or public health. A cousin of mine who was working as a professional stage manager in Los Angeles, which is where I grew up, said, 'You know, I've been paying attention to what you've been doing and you ought to apply for an internship at the Mark Taper Forum,' which is a flagship theatre in the United States for developing new work. So I applied and I got the position. I spent the first few months of my post-collegiate career working in this hotbed of activity, where we were developing plays like Angels in America and The Kentucky Cycle and I didn't understand how extraordinary it was that I was in this particular place at this particular time. It really was an amazing place to get a crash course in creative producing and developing new work and how you really shepherd artists through their own process and give them the kind of support that they need in order to do their best work. I ended up staying there for five years. By the time I left, I was running their new play development programming and coordinating a variety of productions at various venues. I ended up going to the McCarter Theater in New Jersey. There's a much longer history after that.

CT: How would you sum up your role as a producer on Hadestown? What does a producer do?

MI: Everyone's definition of what a producer does will be slightly different. But I really approach producing from a holistic point of view. You have to care for the art and the artists, but you also have to care for the finances and the production. You have to ensure that, whatever the product is that you're producing, the meeting of the art and the audience is happening in the right way, both in terms of the quality of that experience but also the context. Not every play is meant to be a big, huge musical. Or some things that I work on are very experimental. I really look at: What's the work? Who are the artists? Where does it belong? Who is the audience? And then I try to figure out what are the different paths that we need to take in order to shepherd whatever that unique thing is on its path. It involves identifying who the right artists are for the right positions and sometimes that's about personality, talent, point of view, experience. It's about finding the right producing partners, whether they are independent producers like myself or institutions like the Citadel. And finding the community that's going to come see the work and for whom it will really resonate.

CT: You've been involved with Hadestown for a big part of its journey from a workshop to the present day. How has the show evolved over the years?

MI: The show has evolved considerably. When Anaïs Mitchell first wrote the piece, both as an initial community theatre event and then really as a concept album, the concept album had a narrative quality to it but it was really song to song to song and the listener sitting at home could fill in the gaps in their own imagination. Once we were thinking about it as a theatre piece, we really had to think about what do we need to do to help the audience fill in those gaps more actively. So Anaïs, along with Rachel Chavkin and I, and the dramaturg, Ken Cerniglia, and some other wonderful people, really spent time thinking about what's there and what's missing - and what are the pieces of the story that we need to add? So, she's written several songs since the concept album was written and fleshed out characters. She's added a whole chorus of workers that didn't exist before. The story is still the story; the characters are still the characters but now we have a much deeper sense of who they are at the beginning and how they evolve over the course of the show. I think we've filled in some gaps; we've given everybody a little bit more meat and we've given the audience more meat, as well.

CT: What was it about Anaïs' lyrics and this show that made you realize it had such big potential, and could go on to Broadway one day?

MI: Anaïs has the ability, in the way that she chooses words, to express something that is both incredibly personal and intimate and also resonates on so many levels. For me, the definition of something that should be commercial is usually something where anybody that goes to see it can see themselves in it or find some commonality with what's happening. Anaïs has created both iconic characters and also really complex characters. You have Hades, king of the Underworld, who could be just an evil Underworld lord but he's not. He's complicated. He loves Persephone but he only has her six months out of the year. He's trying to build what he believes the world needs. He thinks he's doing the right thing; he's not trying to hurt anybody. Orpheus is a flawed hero. He believes he can change the world with a song but is he an idealist? Eurydice also has all these wonderful qualities - she's smart, hardworking and she's got survival skills - but she also has flaws. Anaïs' words are genuine poetry and the best poetry is usually really spare - you chip away at the excess and what's left is the essence, and that's the way Anaïs writes her lyrics. She plays with words so carefully and they always have more than one meaning. And her music is, I think, some of the best music that I have ever heard in the theatre.

CT: Hadestown is a story based on a Greek myth. It would be easy to dismiss it as a niche topic. But instead, the story seems both timeless and incredibly relevant today. Why does Hadestown have such mass audience appeal?

MI: The thing about classic stories is they're never dated. Here's Hadestown, which is about an artist who scales walls and a leader who's trying to build them - and how we stand up for what we believe in a world where the ground is shifting underneath our feet and where the climate is changing around us. These are all ideas that are embedded in the story that Anaïs wrote - and she started writing it 10 years ago. There was no intention of directly hitting a political topic but that's the beauty of this story. When I read it five years ago, there were other immediate resonances that I thought were uncanny. When you look back at the classic Greek myths, they're there because they were helping the people of those times understand the world around them. Persephone going down below for six months and being up above ground for six months - that helped them understand why we have the seasons. Storytelling is a way throughout millennia that people have come together to try to make sense of their world. That's what Hadestown does. And no matter who you are and what you believe, Hadestown will help you make sense of the world that you live in.

CT: Why is the Citadel the ideal place to scale up the show's size in preparation for Broadway?

MI: The Citadel is a wonderful environment, first of all. Part of what makes a theatre great is the people that work in it. When we were first approached by Artistic Director, Daryl Cloran, and Executive Director, Penny Ritco, we had such a wonderful sense that these were people who were going to make a home for our artists and our show, and that's really important. And then we came for a visit and saw this gorgeous, 700-seat proscenium house, which really was an opportunity for us to take a show that we had previously produced in a very intimate, stripped-down setting in the round and now try to scale up and figure out what this show looks like in a much larger theatre, in a more traditional relationship - with the stage in one place and the audience in another. And, we really liked the idea of being in Canada. At this moment in time, we feel very lucky to be able to be here.

CT: You've worked on so many amazing productions and you've chosen Hadestown. Was there a particular moment or song that made you think, 'I need to be involved in this project; I need to see this through'?

MI: The moment I heard the concept album, I knew that this was something that I needed to work on. Anaïs is an extraordinary composer and storyteller. I've worked on a lot of shows and it's very rare when you have something that has the joy and the richness and the colours of the music and the complexity of the story-telling and the poetry of the lyrics and the joy of the experience - also just the raw emotions of the experience. I make my decisions very intuitively and I knew when I heard Hadestown that this was something really special and that I had to be a part of it.

CT: Why is Rachel Chavkin a good fit for director for this project?

MI: Rachel Chavkin can do anything. I've been watching her work for a number of years and watching her grow as a director over a number of years, and she brings joy and muscularity and rigor and passion and determination to anything she does and she's incredibly visual and visionary. She can look at something on a page and she'll develop ideas and concepts about how they can be realized - and I've seen this in multiple productions, not just Hadestown. She's an extraordinary artist. And she's really great with the actors and creative team and with Anaïs, in both caring for and cajoling them into doing their best work. A really great director is someone who leverages the talents of her team. And what I've watched Rachel do over the years with Hadestown is lift everybody up so they are all working at the highest possible level. Where her work ends and someone else begins is seamless - that, to me, is the sign of a great director.

CT: How do you see Hadestown resonating with people about one year from now? Do you think it's going to provide a kind of comfort?

MI: My hope with Hadestown, given our current circumstances, is that no matter what side of the political spectrum an audience member may sit on, they're going to come to Hadestown and they're going to have a deeper understanding of how complicated our world is, that there is no pure good and no pure evil. I think the thing that we're facing right now, ultimately, as a society is this increasing divisiveness. And, obviously, different people have different values and different ways of looking at things. What I hope Hadestown does is give everyone some empathy - also some joy and relief from the barrage of difficulties that we're facing on a daily basis. I was recently watching a rehearsal and listening to Patrick Page playing Hades and I thought to myself - he has this soliloquy towards the end of the second act, where he's really wrestling with his own demons and what he should do about Orpheus and this growing riot that may be happening amongst the workers and it's complicated. You can't just write him off. He's not just this evil person from the opposite side. I think it's really important for people to see that and have that empathy and have that experience. And, at the same time, to see the young, idealist artist who thinks he can change the world with a song and want him to be able to change the world with a song and also understand that he might not be able to. There's a final moment in the show, when everybody lifts their cup to the idea of trying to stand up for something that you believe in, and that, even though we know how the story might end, we tell it again and again, with the hope that it might turn out differently. So I guess I hope - I get a little emotional when I tell this story - I guess I hope, with Hadestown, that audience members will leave the theatre with some hope and that they won't give up, that they'll keep trying, with the hope that, someday, it will turn out differently.

CT: At the heart of Hadestown is a love story - two very different relationships. What is it about the two love stories that resonates with people?

MI: One of the things that I love about Hadestown is how important love and relationships factor into the storytelling. You've got two amazing love stories. You have Hades and Persephone, the king and queen of the Underworld, who have a mature love, and all of the joys and, frankly, the strains, that go along with years and years of trying to accommodate needs and complications of a relationship, especially when they spend six months apart - and I can just say that anyone who has ever been in a long distance relationship can relate to that. And then also, you have Orpheus and Eurydice. I mean, this is the love story of all love stories. These are two young people who are destined to be together and yet the fates are constantly trying to intervene and pull them apart. With Reeve Carney and T.V. Carpio in the roles here at the Citadel, I can tell you that they are magic together, and it's beautiful to see their love blossom as characters on stage.

Hadestown runs November 11 to December 3, 2017, at Citadel Theatre. For more information or to purchase tickets, call 780.425.1820 or visit www.citadeltheatre.com.

Photo credit: T. Charles Erickson.