Plenty of Broadway shows end with a standing ovation, but not many begin with one. As Lola Tung’s Eurydice and Ani DiFranco’s Persephone took the Hadestown stage for the first time on February 9, the audience erupted into deafening applause that kept everyone on their feet for, well, a while. Eventually, however, Hermes (played by Lillias White) gave the house an authoritative settle down stare. The show really had to go on.
Still, throughout the Tony-award winning musical, based on the tragic Greek myth, the crowd’s impulses often got the better of them. More than once, an usher reprimanded a show-goer for filming the stage with their iPhone. (It was a losing battle; within days, TikTok was flooded with videos of Tung’s performance. Clips of her solo in “Wait for Me,” in particular, have been viewed by millions.) An hour and a half later, Tung, DiFranco, and the rest of the Hadestown cast raised their cups to the audience during their final number, as the curtain closed—and the crowd, almost instantaneously, jumped up from their seats once again.
“I can’t even believe it,” the 21-year-old Tung says of her rousing first show a few days later. She is soft-spoken both by nature and for practical reasons: Now that she’s appearing in eight shows a week, preserving her voice is essential. Drinking orange juice, tea, and water—lots of water—has helped. One thing she quickly noticed about her Hadestown castmates was that they hydrated constantly. “Everybody’s got a water bottle at all times that they’re carrying around with them everywhere,” Tung says; now she does, too. And despite being young, famous, and living in New York City, she also (mostly) spends her nights in. “You really just have to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself—sometimes choosing to go home and sleep instead of going out and doing something with your friends,” she explains.
Tung grew up in New York during a period when, for the first time in decades, Broadway and mainstream culture had become one in the same. She remembers seeing Hamilton in the eighth grade—she purchased an “A.Ham” hat afterwards—and the original cast of Dear Evan Hansen inspiring the kind of brief yet intense obsession that only a teenage girl can sustain. “That was a very, very important show to me for a while,” she says, laughing. Compounding all that was her enrollment at LaGuardia, the performing arts high school made famous by Fame. Everyone was always talking about Broadway because they all wanted to be on it.
Tung did one musical there, Cinderella, in which she played a lady in waiting; she then went on to Carnegie Mellon to study drama. But her life changed her freshman year when she was cast as the lead character, “Belly,” in The Summer I Turned Pretty, an explosively popular Prime Video show based on Jenny Han’s best-selling coming-of-age novel.
Eurydice—a beautiful but jaded young nymph in ripped tights and dark, smudged eyeliner—is certainly a departure from the naive, love-torn Belly.“Did you find any overlap between these two characters?” I ask, before backtracking: “Eh, there actually may be no overlap.” She laughs at my attempt to connect the demonic, soul-crushing Greek underworld of Hades to the teenage dreamland of Cousins Beach, where characters make out on golf courses and flirt at boardwalk amusement parks.
“I mean, they’re existing in completely different worlds and circumstances,” Tung says. Still, she gives the question her best shot. “I do think they’re both people who will say it like it is. They will confront you if you’re playing games.”
We both know it’s a stretch; the whole point of doing a show like Hadestown is to show off your range. Starring in a hit series can be both a blessing and a curse, launching an actor into stardom while potentially pigeon-holing them in the process. Will Tung forever be the young, sweet girl in a teen drama? Or will Belly eventually lead her to edgier territory?
“I want to dip my toe into everything,” Tung says. “I’d love keep exploring different worlds. I don’t know exactly what that looks like next, but I’m excited to see whatever it is.”
