I went to see it tonight. I'd never seen it or even heard all of the music before, so I wasn't fully sure what to expect, other than a general familiarity with the original myth and various retellings.
Turns out it's absolutely gorgeous and a work of art in every way (as retellings of Orpheus and Eurydice should be) and I cried, and I hoped so badly that it might somehow end differently, which is of course so very appropriate given the musical itself and its final note.
Another thing that struck me about it, which strikes me again and again and again as I experience other people's art and think about it (because I naturally overthink everything, it's what I do) - the setting isn't quite literal, and it isn't quite an allegory, and it isn't quite consistent, and I feel like if I wrote something with the setting like this, I would get critiqued and told that the setting needs to be one or the other. I have internalized critique so fully that I am absolutely paralyzed with insecurity about my own writing, because I know it has flaws or inconsistencies, that my settings are not airtight and my plots and characters are imperfect, and also that my style is off-putting for some people and Generally Understood Wisdom tells us that "purple prose" is an insult and we had better try to avoid it in our own work or we'll render ourselves unsellable.
Yet again and again and again, I find that other people's stories break the rules, sometimes in quite dramatic ways. There may be plot holes you could drive a star destroyer through, or character motivations that defy belief, or settings that look pretty and are all about the vibes but don't actually hold up to scrutiny. And you know what? These other stories still manage to succeed at what they do. People enjoy them, sometimes love them, despite their flaws.
I wish I could turn off the voice in my head that points out what's wrong with my own work and tells me that it needs to be fixed or the whole thing is too fundamentally broken to bother with. I've always gotten the best responses from readers when I write unabashedly in my own voice, and yet even when I throw posts like this together, I'm so insecure about my own voice that I struggle to cut all the personality and character out, instead of just letting it flow naturally and sound like me. I'm writing this after bedtime so maybe it will be more successful at sounding like me than usual.
Everything I love has flaws, but I love it despite the flaws. And these so-called flaws aren't even actually problems at all in many cases - they're simply not priorities for the creator, or necessary for this particular piece of art. I think there's value in recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of the things you love, and taking away from that ways you can grow and do better as a creator yourself, but I think I'm far too preoccupied with what's wrong with my own work. I have received so much criticism over the years that it's all I hear and all I think when I look at my own works, and as a result I am paralyzed with all of my projects.
I've recently pulled some of my writing projects out of the deep freeze, because I'm getting a little more of my brain back as my health improves, but I am so scared of working on them and so very full of doubt.
Hadestown is a gorgeous work of art. It doesn't need to have answers to every question. It doesn't need to be able to withstand the kind of critique you get in workshop groups. It holds up incredibly well as what it is, and it does everything it needs to do, and that's good enough. More than good enough. It's amazing.
I need to internalize this. I hope someday I will.
