I apologise if this is like, common sense in the Hadestown fandom lol.
But Ive recently started getting into this musical through my love of Greek mythology, and after watching it, Ive noticed Hadestown isnt really the ‘underworld’ in the normal sense of the place, where the dead go to die: “you either get to hell or to hadestown,” “she was dead to the world, anyway,” “before I send you to the great beyond.”
Now in the original myth, after Orpheus loses Eurydice, many say that Orpheus wanders the land in a state of grief, before getting torn apart by maenads (crazed followers of Dionysus). And Ive always found solace in the fact that the OG Orpheus and Eurydice do actually get reunited, in death at the very least.
But what makes Hadestown breaking down sobbing-ly sad for me is the fact that even after Orpheus dies, they will never be reunited. Eurydice will be forever trapped as a worker in Hadestown, and Orpheus will get sent to whatever the afterlife is in the musical. Well, that would be if they werent doomed to play out the same story time and time again.