And Now For Something Musically Different

Epic: The Musical

This post is a continuation of my substack on the Iliad. All proceeds from the substack are donated to classics adjacent non-profits on a monthly basis. Last year this substack provided over $2k in charitable donations. Don’t forget about Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things. Here is its amazon page. here is the link to the company doing the audiobook and here is the press page.

A few years ago, people started asking me if I had heard about Epic: The Musical. Among my many annoying tendencies is to be dismissive when someone tells me I am going to like something. There are some good reasons for this (anyone who works on the past and had to live through the initial popularity of The Davinci Code knows what is is like to have someone recommend you total trash with the best intentions). There are some bad reasons for this too–I retain a bit too much of the GenX pose that nothing popular can be cool. (I rejected Greenday straight out when Dookie was released because “punk is dead” and, well, I guess I am in my fourth decade of being very wrong about things.)

So, when students started telling me I should listen to a musical in progress based on the Odyssey I was skeptical. But I also figured, let them do their thing and enjoy it. I tend to be something of a curmudgeon with adaptations of the Odyssey anyway. But, then, last year, my oldest child, Aalia, discovered it and asked me and I could no longer use professional indifference as an excuse to hide.

Here’s the thing: Epic: The Musical is pretty good. People should check it out. Seriously.

A few weeks ago, I joined Christine Vogler and Joe Goodkin on a (friendly) takeover of Liv Albert’s Let’s Talk About Myths, Baby! Podcast to talk about Epic: The Musical.

I think we cover a lot of what is really engaging about Epic: The Musical in the podcast (although I don’t think we ever resolve whether or not it could actually be performed), but I do want to share a little here about why I think it is worth taking some time to listen to. (And how it may be more insightful than a lot of scholarly engagement with the epic…). But, first, let’s talk about what it is.

Epic: The Musical is a series of short albums (called “sagas”) based on the Odyssey and started in 2019 by Jorge Rivera-Herrans while he was an undergraduate. The songs became something of a TikTok phenomenon. The last Saga was released in December 2024. What makes it difficult to define is its status as a social media performance piece. Not only are the songs released on streaming platforms, but videos of the performers were released on TikTok with commentary from Rivera-Herrans. There’s a Wiki that includes information about the music, the performers, and the lyrics, but the official website emphasizes that this is also a community piece:

The EPIC community is comprised of over 410,000 people on TikTok, 15,000 people on Discord, and more across other platforms. This positive and supportive community comes together every day to make fan art, perform song covers, create animatics, and spread the word about the development of EPIC.

The YouTube page includes official songs, videos of the cast listening to the songs, and versions of the songs in development and conversations about the process. Fans have created art, animation, music videos. Read some of the comments and you will get a sense of how engaged the audience is.

There are nine sagas in total adding up to 40 songs. (I don’t believe it has ever been performed live and in person.) The story is not strictly the Odyssey. It starts with the “Troy Saga” then moves through the Cyclops scene and towards the hero’s homecoming. It is more of a linear telling of the story that basically works like this: Troy Saga (Sack of Troy to the arrival on Cyclops’ island); Cyclops Saga (book 9); Ocean Saga (Book 10); Circe Saga (Book 10); Underworld Saga (Book 11); Thunder Saga (Book 12?): Wisdom Saga (Books 1-5); Vengeance Saga (Book 11 again); Ithaca Saga (Books 21-23).

This summary shows the Epic: The Musical spends the most time on Odysseus’ own version of his story (what is often can called the apologos or apologoi) in Homeric scholarship. Most engagements with the Odyssey privilege the legendary events of books 9-12. I have always found this intriguing because ancient artwork indicates that most of these events were already well-known before the Odyssey we have was written down. (Some of our earliest Greek art shows Odysseus with the Cyclops.). But our Odyssey’s version of these famous tales is less than heroic. As Jonathan Shay argues–and as I have also explored myself–Odysseus comes out pretty badly if you read the events of the apologoi closely.

The Odysseus in Epic: The Musical shares some kinship with The Return’s Odysseus. Both seem to be traumatized by their experiences. A primary difference with Epic’s Odysseus is that he struggles with moral decisions (killing the infant Astyanax in The Troy Saga) and the cause of his suffering at sea is his opposition to Athena: Athena chastises him for blinding but not killing Polyphemos in “My Goodbye” (from the Cyclops Saga). This Odysseus is tortured by the actions he has taken and turns out to be haunted by the loss of his companions.

I listened to each saga with my children while driving them to school over a few weeks. My oldest brought Gareth Hinds’ graphic novel of the Odyssey in the car to match the songs to the events and we each developed our own favorite songs and details. My favorite thing about the songs are how they interpret the Odyssey and their hero in different ways. Each song is, in a way, an intervention in our collective text of the Odyssey. They are scholarly in the traditional sense of not being in the service of daily labor, but instead in reflection of human experience and creations.

(Also, I am viscerally vulnerable to music theater. My children have seen me cry watching The Greatest Showman and Disney’s Zombies)

I’ll give one example of what struck me as both insightful and creative. The song “Love in Paradise” is mostly a conversation between Odysseus and Calypso. It begins with a montage of previous songs from his travails and then transitions to a lighter musical number roughly based on book 5.

The conceit seems to be that Odysseus is at the moment of the song trying to understand how he has been their seven years and sifting through his memories. Odysseus ends up on a ledge, thinking about his mistakes and experiences. The production integrates fragments from other songs and provides the spirit, if not the content, of Odysseus’ final conversations with Calypso.

Time can take a heavy toll

[CALYPSO, spoken]
Odysseus?

[ODYSSEUS]
All I hear are screams

[CALYPSO, spoken]
Ody, get away from the ledge!

[ODYSSEUS]
You don't know what I've gone through
You don't know what I've sacrificed
Every comrade I long knew
Every friend, I saw them die
And all I hear are screams

[CALYPSO]
It will be fine, dear
Come back inside, dear
Love of my life, come back to paradise

What I really appreciate about this song–and which extends in general to the whole Musical–is the way Rivera-Herrans reads into the seams of the epic and between the lines to flesh out the inner workings of the characters. By my interpretation, this entire song reads into a famously opaque set of lines from the Odyssey. When we first see Odysseus’ in the Odyssey, he is not heroic by any means

Homer, Odyssey (5.151–159)

Kalypso found [Odysseus] sitting on the water’s edge. His eyes were never dry
of tears and his sweet life was draining away as he mourned
over his homecoming, since the goddess was no longer pleasing to him.
But it was true that he stretched out beside her at night by necessity
In her hollow caves, unwilling when she was willing.
By day, however, he sat on the rocks and sands
wracking his heart with tears, groans and grief,
Shedding tears as he gazed upon the barren sea.

τὸν δ’ ἄρ’ ἐπ’ ἀκτῆς εὗρε καθήμενον· οὐδέ ποτ’ ὄσσε
δακρυόφιν τέρσοντο, κατείβετο δὲ γλυκὺς αἰὼν
νόστον ὀδυρομένῳ, ἐπεὶ οὐκέτι ἥνδανε νύμφη.
ἀλλ’ ἦ τοι νύκτας μὲν ἰαύεσκεν καὶ ἀνάγκῃ
ἐν σπέεσι γλαφυροῖσι παρ’ οὐκ ἐθέλων ἐθελούσῃ·
ἤματα δ’ ἂμ πέτρῃσι καὶ ἠϊόνεσσι καθίζων
[δάκρυσι καὶ στοναχῇσι καὶ ἄλγεσι θυμὸν ἐρέχθων]
πόντον ἐπ’ ἀτρύγετον δερκέσκετο δάκρυα λείβων.

There is no indication in the epic itself about the source of Odysseus’ sorrow. One might imagine from the context that he is upset about his endlessly prolonged nostos, his homecoming. Yet, there’s a strange disjunction between that and his behavior, what I have called his anhedonia. Instead of making this all about his longing for home, spouse, and child, Rivera-Herrans has interpreted this moment as one shaped by the trauma of losing his men, of all his suffering at war and sea, and his struggle to understand his place in the world. It is a creative and insightful reading that made me reconsider the events of book 5.

This is chiefly what I find important about creative receptions like Epic: The Musical. They both update ancient narratives for modern audiences and provide reinterpretations. In the latter capacity, Epic does as well–if not better–than a lot of scholarship. You could do a lot worse with 2 hours and 20 minutes than listening to these sagas.

While looking around, I found that there are other Odyssey based musicals. Somehow I missed that Prince produced a series of songs for Glam, Slam, Ulysses

Here’s the song for the Cyclops scene, “interactive”