“I can’t do anything today!” Lillias White said as she emerged, somewhat flustered, from the elevator outside the Tricorne costume shop on the sixth floor of a Midtown Manhattan office building on a recent Tuesday morning. Her face was hidden behind white sunglasses and a navy and green star-patterned mask.
“All you have to do is stand,” Michael Krass, the costume designer for the Broadway musical “Hadestown,” reassured her.
White, 71, was here for her second costume fitting as the next narrator of “Hadestown,” a role she will perform eight times per week beginning on Tuesday. A veteran stage actress who won a Tony Award in 1997 for playing a middle-aged prostitute in the Cy Coleman musical “The Life,” she will become the first woman to play the Hermes character, now called Missus Hermes.
“I’m looking forward to doing what I do vocally,” she said. “And I’ll probably get some notes about reining it in, but” — she grinned — “I want to give the people what they came for.”
Krass and Katherine Marshall, the owner of Tricorne, ushered her down the hallway, past racks of costumes for the Broadway musical “Wicked” and the HBO series “The Gilded Age,” to a fitting room lined with a semicircle of mirrors.
The first order of business was the shoes: White, who is onstage nearly the entire two-and-a-half-hour show, had put in a specific request for her boot heels. They should be no higher than two inches, so her feet wouldn’t hurt.
“I got a pedicure last night,” she told Krass, flashing hot pink toenails peeking out from sparkly white wedge sandals, as Pam Brick, a draper, and Siena Zoe Allen, the show’s associate costume designer, arrived to assist.
Then it was time for the big reveal: The suit. Krass stepped out into the hall so she could change.
The original look for Hermes, who was conceived as a vagabond, was a brown rumpled suit and muddy boots, Krass said. But then in a fitting, André De Shields, who won a Tony Award in 2019 for originating the role on Broadway, asked: Why is it rumpled?
That led to De Shields’s now-iconic dapper silver suit, which was closely tailored with 1970s-style bell bottoms.
“But for Lillias,” Krass said, throwing his arms wide, “she has a big love and joy that fills the room. She needs something expansive to match that.”
White had changed into a silver pantsuit made from the same English wool as De Shields’s costume, topped by a collared, 1950s-style swing coat — shorter in the front and longer in the back — whose sweeping folds cascaded over gray trousers and low-heeled black boots that would later be painted silver.
And she had a surprise in store: After scrutinizing the V-neck of the jacket, which closed with a single button, she threw it open to reveal a gleaming black-and-silver vest.
“I feel pretty,” she sang, grinning at her reflection.
Then her face turned serious.
“It’s a graveyard,” she sang — a line from the show’s opening number, “Road to Hell,” — raising her legs and stomping her feet as she looked in the mirrors on either side. She mimed shoveling. Crouched. Straightened up. Beamed. She and Krass agreed: The suit fit well.
It was approaching 11 a.m., time to start making her way to rehearsal, so White changed back into her clothes — a navy and white top with raw edges from Kutula by Africana, an African clothing store in Los Angeles, dangling gold-and-blue Sylverwear earrings, bluejeans and her white-sequined wedges. (“They have nice arch support,” she said.) She headed to a waiting SUV that would take her 10 blocks to the Walter Kerr Theater, where she was in her third week of rehearsals for the musical.
On the drive over, White, ensconced in the back seat with a tumbler of coffee and still humming the “Road to Hell” melody, shared how she first became involved in the show, which she had seen seven or eight times: She had been discussing De Shields’s departure with a friend, who suggested she would be good for the role. White immediately called her agent.
“I was like, ‘Why not?’” said White, who had recently returned to the role of the prison matron Mama Morton in the long-running Broadway production of “Chicago,” a character she first played in 2006. “As long as my voice can handle it,” she said, referring to Hermes’s vocal range, whose bottom notes are lower than she typically sings onstage.
Rachel Chavkin, the director of “Hadestown,” was thrilled by the idea.
“We’ve long known that Hermes’s gender is not germane to the story in any way,” Chavkin said in a recent phone interview.
The production team has had conversations about inclusive casting in the Broadway, West End and tour productions, Chavkin said. A nonbinary actor, Yael “YaYa” Reich, is currently understudying the role of Eurydice and the Fates on Broadway. “Eurydice’s pronoun is she,” Chavkin said, “but that shouldn’t necessarily limit the actors we consider.”
White pointed to other recent examples of cross-gender casting, which is having a bit of a moment on New York stages: Danai Gurira in the titular role in the Public Theater’s production of “Richard III” in Central Park; the original Persephone in “Hadestown,” Amber Gray, who left the production in the spring to play Banquo in “Macbeth” on Broadway; the all-female, nonbinary and transgender cast of the upcoming Broadway revival of the musical “1776.”
Regardless, following in the footsteps of De Shields, who left the role in May after three years to prepare for the upcoming Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman” this fall, is a formidable task. But White, whom the New York Times music critic Stephen Holden wrote combines the “sass of a classic blues mama with the skill of a Broadway star,” said she didn’t want her Hermes to be De Shields 2.0.
“She’ll be softer in sections of the show, and harder than a male Hermes in some,” said White, warm and personable as she prepared to take the stage. “I’m a mother and a grandmother, and I look at Orpheus as my charge. I’m very proud of him and protective of him, and so when I see Hades doing what Hades does —” she trailed off. “I don’t know yet, she may be rougher. She may be overprotective.”
Another personal tie, she said, was that Hermes can be thought of as a labor organizer in the musical — a role shared by White, who is a founding member of the nonprofit Black Theater United, a coalition of Black theater artists that works to fight racism in the theater community.
“The primary note I’ve given her is remembering that Hermes isn’t just the central host, but is also the political spine,” Chavkin said. “Now, with a female Hermes, it’s a rich and undertold story of the role women play in labor movements.”
Soon, it was time for White to head to the stage for the afternoon run-through, with understudies and stand-ins playing the other parts. White took up De Shields’s familiar perch at stage right.
The role, she said, was not overly challenging vocally. “It’s remembering not what I say, but where I say it,” she said. “There are lots of places that start, ‘Orpheus was a poor boy’ or ‘Eurydice was a hungry young girl.’ So I have to remember where in the story each one goes.”
But as soon as Sean Mayes, the associate music director of “Hadestown,” took his place behind the piano, she was all confidence. She stood up straighter, eyes wide as she surveyed the scene onstage.
“A’ight?” she asked the other actors, paying homage to De Shields’s hallmark opening phrase.
“A’ight!” they said.
“A’ight?” she asked the few observers in the audience.
“A’ight,” they responded.
She launched into the show’s opening number, “Road to Hell” — “Chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga, chugga,” she sang, imitating a train — though she briefly had to restart after forgetting the opening hums.
“Once upon a time there was a railroad line,” she sang.
“Mmm,” the other actors intoned.
She introduced the Fates, Persephone, Hades.
“We got any other gods?” she asked. “Oh right, I almost forgot. …”
“Missus Hermes,” she said, flashing a grin. “That’s me!”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
