There are moments in theatre when you stop thinking about the production in front of you and simply feel it.
Belfast School of Performing Arts’ Hadestown: Teen Edition gave me several of them.
The production brings together 86 young Northern Ireland performers aged between 14 and 19, divided across two complete casts. We saw Team Olympus / Cast 2 at The MAC, performing a show brought to the stage after just three weeks of rehearsals.
That achievement alone is extraordinary.
But what happens on stage deserves considerably more.
Hadestown retells the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice through a score filled with folk, jazz and blues. It is a story of love, hope and sacrifice, and this young cast throws itself completely into it.
Hannah McAllister Colacio as Hermes has a soulful voice that seems to belong to someone far beyond her years. She has the confidence and presence needed to lead us into the strange world of Hadestown.
But it was Brody Elliott as Orpheus and Catriona McCloskey as Eurydice who stayed with me most.
Brody has a beautiful and deeply emotive voice. Every time he sang, I felt it. There was something about the vulnerability in his performance that made the relationship at the heart of the story feel completely real.
More than once, I realised there were tears in my eyes.
Catriona’s Eurydice complements him beautifully. Her voice is sweet and tender, but there is strength there too, and together they make you care deeply about what happens to these two young lovers.
Around them is an enormous ensemble. I tried counting everyone on stage at one point and gave up somewhere around 35.
Yet the scale never overwhelms the story. Instead, the ensemble creates the world around Orpheus and Eurydice. Voices build, bodies move and suddenly this youth production feels very big indeed.
The lighting is superb, the set works beautifully and the costumes complete a production that looks remarkably assured.
If I had one criticism, it would be the volume. It was loud. Very loud. As someone who wears hearing aids, it is a rare occasion when I take them out during a performance, but I did here, and even then it occasionally felt a touch too loud. With voices this good, they really don’t need to be pushed quite so hard.
There can be few audiences quite like one filled with parents, grandparents, siblings and friends watching someone they love step onto a stage. There was an understandable sense of pride in the room, but this wasn’t applause simply because people knew the performers.
The cast earned it.
These are young people taking on difficult music, complex characters and considerable emotional territory with confidence, discipline and heart.
My one hope is that they don’t stop doing this.
Because the real shame about Hadestown: Teen Edition isn’t anything happening on stage. It’s that it is only here for three nights.
A production and a level of performance like this deserves a bigger audience. It feels capable of filling the Grand Opera House for a week long run, and I would happily have watched it there.
I left The MAC still thinking about Orpheus and Eurydice, and particularly those voices.
Somewhere across these two casts are performers we may well be buying tickets to see on Northern Ireland’s stages for years to come.
For now, we only have three nights to see them.
Hadestown: Teen Edition
The MAC, Belfast
20–22 August 2026
Tickets £24 including booking fee
Belfast Times attended the production with complimentary review tickets.
