On March 25th, 2026, the Suffield High School Drama Club went on an adventure all the way to the Big Apple to see a Broadway production of the musical Hadestown and to participate in a workshop taught by a real Broadway actress. This expedition has been in the making for years and the students and chaperones loved the opportunity it brought to these unique drama club students. One of the chaperones, Miss Blais said “The International Thespian Society, they had mentioned that they thought it would be really cool to do a workshop with actual actors for Broadway. And so I did a really quick Google search and found that it was like a thing that you could actually do… and they thought it was an incredible experience so I looked into it and that’s why we did it.”
The Experience P.1
Bright and early at 6:00 AM, the 40+ participants hopped on a coach bus and headed all the way down Connecticut and to New York City. Although the students went through quite a bit of traffic, as New York City is known for, they made it to their workshop.
Taught by Broadway swing (responsible for covering multiple ensemble roles in a musical,) Ayla Ciccone-Burton, the students warmed up with various acting exercises. “I learned how to handle stress, especially before performances or auditions, which is really helpful because I do drama,” says junior and ITS member Lily Macsata. Ayla also gave a rousing Q+A about her time on Broadway and the West End. The students loved to hear about the varied experiences of Ayla including her time doing the production of The Great Gatsby with Broadway legend Jeremy Jordan.
After an amazing lunch, (thank you to the Brooklyn Deli in Times Square!) the students made their way over to the historical Walter Kerr Theater to finally see Hadestown. An eager wait in line and many ticket scans later, the students were in their seats, eagerly awaiting for the show to begin.
The Review
Full disclosure, I went into this musical not knowing what to expect. I had only listened to one of the songs and had never seen a real show on Broadway before. I cannot overestimate how impressed I was with this production.
Hadestown is about the ever-repeated tale of Orpheus and Eurydice (the pronunciation is you-RID-i-cee, trust me, I’ve made this mistake enough times to know) and the tale of Hades and Persephone. The stories are played out in tandem during this musical and I was blown away by how well they worked together. The music style is not like most musicals, jazz and blues influenced and the cherry on top was a good quantity of trombone solos, which work especially well when the musicians are onstage during the entire musical. The music was very moving and having different progressions of music for each character lent itself to a very unique musical experience.
I have to take some time to also give props to the people behind the scenes who you can see their work come through every single line and movement of the cast. The set had a unique feature of having a spinning stage which could also move up and down at will, giving entirely new symbolism to many aspects of the production. Another thing that just gave me, as a proclaimed theater geek, life is that every single character had lighting that symbolized who they were and what they represented. Persephone’s color was green to symbolize her love for the flowers and being on Earth and Orpheus’s color was blue to symbolize the life he wanted to bring back to his world. A confined set could make some musicals feel claustrophobic but with the fashion in which the staging and the lighting was made and the choreography set, it felt like a whole different world than our own.
Now onto the cast, oh, the cast. Joshua Colley, known for playing Captain Hook in Descendents: Rise of Red, created such a depth to the character Orpheus as he played a more naive and sensitive version than others in the past. The juxtaposition of this character to Jordan Tyson’s Eurydice, a hardened, negative young girl, makes for a fantastic and meaningful love story. The narrator to the story, Hermes, played by J. Harrison Ghee, brought a playfulness that I believe needed to be brought to the character as opposed to the more serious portrayal brought by André De Shields in the original cast recording. With this powerhouse cast, the well known ending to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice became all the more heartbreaking and unexpected.
The Experience P.2
As the students left, through tears, they had the fortune of meeting J. Harrison Ghee and Joshua Colley at the stage door and were even more fortunate to take a picture with Joshua, see right. As the students packed their bags and got on the bus, they looked back on the experience with pride and happiness that they were able to have such a once in a lifetime experience with many of their closest friends. “It was so spectacular.” says junior and Drama Club member Kaylee Barnes, “It was my first time (in New York City) and it was one of my favorite trips ever. I have so many photos and I was with my favorite people and I had such a blast.”
This trip would not have been possible without the generous grant provided by the Suffield Foundation for Excellent Schools and the Drama Club and International Thespian Society thanks them.
