This hellishly good Hadestown cast is quite simply heavenly

The show boasts a suite of charismatic stars but Rokobaro is something else, scorching with off-the-charts sex appeal, wild physical abandon and powerhouse singing.

Elenoa Rokobaro as Persephone in the brilliant Hadestown. Picture: Lisa Tomasetti

It’s only February but the outstanding music-theatre performance of the year is likely in front of us right now. Elenoa Rokobaro could power the Sydney CBD, so electrifying is her Persephone in Anais Mitchell’s unruly, enthralling, theatrically bold Hadestown.

The show boasts a suite of charismatic stars but Rokobaro is something else, scorching with off-the-charts sex appeal, wild physical abandon and powerhouse singing. She’s a force of nature, which is exactly right for Persephone, a goddess on whom the earth relies for abundance.

Mitchell’s ingenious retelling of Ancient Greek myth and Rachel Chavkin’s whirlwind staging prove there’s a reason why the old stories last. The present is laid over the past and the fit is exact.

The best thing, though, is how openly the show’s beating heart is exposed. Every feeling is on display, raw and immediate. Mitchell’s lyrics are often extremely clever but never at the expense of direct communication. Hadestown has a lot to say and there is never any doubt about its meaning. No wonder it went away from the 2019 Tony Awards laden with honours.

The overarching narrative goes like this. Persephone is persuaded by her husband Hades (Adrian Tamburini), overlord of the dead, to spend a bit longer than usual in his underworld empire.

Hades is keen to enjoy an extended conjugal visit for obvious reasons but it means the earth will have to do without Persephone for a while.

Bitter cold and famine take their toll. Eurydice (Abigail Adriano, singing sweetly in the show’s one underwritten role) ends up in Hadestown. Hades likes what he sees, Eurydice’s lover Orpheus (Noah Mullins, entrancing) comes looking for her – and paths collide.

Keeping everything straight is Hermes, the messenger god (Christine Anu in fiery voice). She is our guide, commenting from a perch in something like a New Orleans jazz dive that morphs vividly into the hellish Hadestown (Rachel Hauck created the enticingly grungy scenic design and Bradley King the splendid lighting).

A great onstage band, directed from the piano by Laura Tipoki, deftly jumps from wailing jazz to rousing gospel, touches of folk and earnest balladry, just because. The eclecticism works, even if there’s a tiny voice inside the head whispering that many of the romantic numbers feel a touch pallid compared with the punch and swagger of Persephone, Hades and the deliciously know-it-all Fates (Sarah Murr, Jennifer Trijo and Imani Williams) who take crap from no one.

Tamburini’s Hades gets to ensnare Eurydice and deliver a paean to the wall he’s had built around Hadestown, oozing dangerous magnetism in the first and saturnine authority in the second.

While Tamburini plumbs the depths of his bass baritone range in stately Leonard Cohen-esque rhythmic speech, Mullins’s Orpheus sings his heart and soul out yearningly with an ethereal, often stratospherically high, sound.

The contrast is striking, the dark and the light struggling for supremacy in a world racked by the endless greed of despots and a climate under siege. Can those frail companions love and hope survive?

As Hermes notes, it’s a sad song but we sing it again and again anyway.

Also sad is the large amount of bother co-producer Opera Australia finds itself in at present, rightly including questions about the role of musicals in saving the day.

It comes down to how many and which ones, really. It’s that simple. Former OA artistic director Jo Davies’s choice of Hadestown was inspired.

Hadestown by Opera Australia and Jones Theatrical Group runs at the Theatre Royal, Sydney, until April 26. Melbourne, from May 8