Penelope: An Epic New Musical

Penelope: An Epic New Musical is a one-woman musical that retells The Odyssey through the eyes of Odysseus's wife. Its creators call it live concert theater, a format that keeps a live band in the room with the audience. It is a new chamber musical, not a revival.

Classic Stage Company, founded in 1967, presents it in association with rigor + ruckus as a limited engagement. CSC bills it as an add-on to its 2026-27 season, separate from the season FlexPass subscriptions. As of October 2026, Grace McLean plays Penelope and co-wrote the book with Alex Bechtel and director Eva Steinmetz.

In the myth, Penelope is queen of Ithaca, wife of Odysseus and mother of Telemachus, and she keeps more than a hundred suitors at bay with clever schemes. The musical picks up with her wait already twenty years old. The other soldiers came home from the Trojan War years ago, and Odysseus has not.

Penelope decides to tell her side, though she wants a drink first. She talks about loneliness, her son's disappearance, the suitors, the gods and what her marriage means to her, and she measures herself against her cousin Helen of Troy. Alcohol and dry wit help her cope with dark imaginings. Weaving at the loom, done by day and undone by night to stall the suitors, returns as an image. The show stays inside her head and does not act out Odysseus's voyage.

Bechtel's score blends folk and pop/rock, and the creators call the piece a contemporary chamber musical with a folk-pop score. Penelope fronts the band and carries the play, in her house and on a stage at once. The musicians share the space with her and the audience, act as a musical Greek chorus and voice Athena. Titles on the song list include "Drunk Iliad," "Prayer," "Weaving," "Athena's Song" and "Tired of Faith."

At CSC, Bechtel plays piano on stage with four more musicians. The licensed orchestration is piano, percussion, violin, viola and cello. The licensed script is set in the present day and in ancient Greece, with contemporary costumes.

The project began in summer 2020 as an album by Bechtel, written during pandemic quarantine while he lived in a different city from his partner. In 2021 he and Steinmetz teamed up with McLean and spent two years turning it into a stage piece. The world premiere ran in September 2023 at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, New York. Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, followed in 2024, then Stage West in Fort Worth, Texas, and Theatre Horizon in Norristown, Pennsylvania, in 2025.

As of October 2026, McLean is the performer attached to the New York run. CSC calls the September 2025 staging at the Ancram Center for the Arts in Ancram, New York, the first full production with her in the title role. Concerts in New York in October 2025 were followed by a live album, Penelope: Live from Joe's Pub, released on July 16, 2026. The show then played the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2026. Previews are set to begin on December 10, 2026, with opening night on December 11, 2026.