VIEW PROJECT
Broadway / Walter Kerr Theatre
HADESTOWN
Sound design for a mythic world built from machinery, music, and atmosphere.
Opened April 17, 2019
— Hadestown sits at the center of Jessica Paz’s sound design practice: a long-running Broadway work where song, story, ritual, and system must remain alive eight times a week.
METHOD
Sound Design; ongoing production continuity; international and touring support
Sound World
Everything brought into the room is part of the design: the system, the microphones, the tuning, and the way each audience member is invited into the same world.
Jessica collaborated with Nevin Steinberg on the Broadway sound design for Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown, a production that asks sound to move between folk concert, myth, memory, and industrial underworld.
The work is both intimate and massive: a design that keeps the audience close to the performers while allowing the world of the piece to open around them.
Pre-Production
Production and backstage imagery archive
Listening with intention means protecting the emotional center of the score while allowing the room, band, and voices to breathe. The design carries the story without calling attention away from it.
The ongoing life of Hadestown also requires production leadership: maintaining consistency, supporting new companies, and responding to the living realities of performers, musicians, crews, and rooms.
Continuity
The process is part design, part production continuity. It includes tuning, collaboration, handoff, troubleshooting, and an ongoing relationship with a show that continues to evolve.
The work is in keeping the world alive through every transfer, tune, and maintenance call.
It begins with the room.
What the Audience Feels
The result is a sonic world that preserves human intimacy within the myth.
The design supports a living score and a living company, balancing musical detail, storytelling clarity, and the ritual scale of the production.
Project Images
Show up for the actors. Show up for the story.
Recognition
Tony Award and Drama Desk Award-winning sound design; Outer Critics Circle nomination.
Hadestown — Sound Design of a Musical
Hadestown earned Jessica Paz and Nevin Steinberg the Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for sound design, with additional Outer Critics Circle recognition.
This recognition was also a historic first: the first Tony nomination for a woman in Best Sound Design of a Musical, and the first Tony win by a woman for sound design.
