“I had to find my way to her over the years, but it always started in the music,” Amber Gray said of finding her way to Hadestown’s Persephone, on opening night. “I, Amber Gray, just have a really good time singing those songs every night and then the rest of that falls into place.”

The Lady of the Underground that audiences see eight times a week is truly a creation of Gray’s, having explored her for years with writer Anaïs Mitchell, director Rachel Chavkin, and choreographer David Neumann.

“I don't really consider myself a dancer, I very rarely pass a dance call,” she says. And yet, the movement vocabulary for Persephone is specific. “A lot of times [David] and Rachel gave me a prompt and let me improvise something. Rachel gave me a prompt about an exorcism and getting out the demons, that whole second line sequence, before we had to go down under and it weirdly turned into [what we have].”

Gray has always found comfort in the unconventional—and dark. In the video above, she reveals that the first show she ever did as a kid was “a weird musical adaptation of Jurassic Park,” and that the show that most impacted her was Medea starring Fiona Shaw. She also shares the writer with whom she most wants to collaborate and what the title of her own bio-musical would be.

Videography and editing by Roberto Araujo.