Being the Hades of Hadestown has had its perks for Patrick Page. With a baritone that booms and an imperious manner, Page lorded majestically over this evil underworld for quite a spell—from its New York Theater Workshop inception in 2016 to an Edmonton production in 2017 to a slot at London’s National in 2018 to, finally, Broadway’s Walter Kerr where the show opened in March of 2019 and is now in its fourth year. Along the way, Page picked up a Featured Actor nomination and Hadestown itself amassed eight Tonys.

“The longest I did it was on Broadway,” Page tells Observer. Although he was having one helluvah time there, after six years in the role he opted to turn in his pitchfork in 2022 and head for greener pastures. That turned out to be Washington, DC, and a production of King Lear in the spring of 2023, helmed by Simon Godwin, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater Company there. “I had the most marvelous time with him,” Page says—marvelous enough to broach another subject.

With the SAG-Aftra strike having shut down TV and film production, Page turned his thoughts to a scary but scholarly masterclass in Shakespearean skullduggery, All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain, that he’d developed a few years before. And he got Godwin to direct it. All the Devils Are Here was first presented online in 2020 by the Shakespeare Theater Company.........

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