Gushing about Kurt Elling
I genuinely think his Hermes might be my favourite interpretation I’ve seen.
I’ve noticed that Hermes tends to get played quite.. removed? Detached? Kind of ambivalent and ‘all-knowing’, knowing that this isn’t going to end well and just watching everything unfold from a distance, with the audience. And don’t get me wrong, I like that, and there’s a place for that. But Elling’s Hermes feels so much more paternal. He genuinely cares for both Orpheus and Eurydice, he looks at them so tenderly, and he tries to see if he can appeal to them to make different decisions this time around so that the tragedy doesn’t happen again, like when he asks Orpheus to “look up” in ‘Chant’, or how despondent he looks when Eurydice gives him the coin to go to Hadestown.
A great example is during ‘Way Down Hadestown Reprise’, when he says how Eurydice “sold her life away”, he doesn’t say that with the intention to shock the audience like so many others. He says that with a heartbroken exasperation, like he’s so frustrated that she made that poor choice. Just fantastic!!
At every turning point, he’s increasingly more sad and disappointed, because he knows where the story will end, and he can’t do anything to stop it.
Like UGH it’s so precious. He is genuinely trying to collect himself at the end, when it ended badly again. Him wiping his tears, gosh.
Kurt Elling you ate down 😭