EPIC: The Musical – Contemporising A Classical Hero

On December 3rd, 2025 Jorge Rivera Herrans released a snippet of “Pride of Troy”, one of the many themed songs that will make it to his new album, Ilium, a musical adaptation of the Trojan War. It will be another Greek retelling of a tale heard time and again, only now with the wit, music, and contemporary tongue Herrans offers with his pieces. Given the success of his EPIC: The Musical, it is only fair that expectations run high, and for the right reasons.

Herrans’ famed EPIC is a concept album, where individual tracks gain meaning in a collection, accessible on platforms like Spotify and YouTube. Like Ilium intends to be, this was Herrans’ spin on the Odyssey and retains some of the Homeric essence by remaining true to its form, the form of the epic, to be listened to in viva voce. In December of 2024, Herrans and his cast of consummate singers and songwriters drew to a close the two-year-long saga of nine song cycles. Across forty songs, they narrate the odyssey of Greek hero Odysseus, with the tell-tale reparations of the modern lens, from the end of the Trojan war to his return to his family in Ithaca.  

‘Just A Man’, the second song of the saga, is a phrase repeated throughout the musical each time the gods intervene and push the Greek hero to perform acts that would chip away at his humanity. It is here that I believe lie the primary driving factors behind Herrans’ characterisation of Odysseus– his humanity and mortality. Odysseus begins the musical as a man who avoids bloodshed as far as possible, reprimanded for his choices by the divine, to whom mortality and human life are fleeting. But by the time Odysseus returns to Ithaca, after facing a myriad of mythical opposition from sirens to Poseidon himself, he is stripped of his mercy and humanity. He becomes the bloodthirsty warrior Athena intended for him to become when she took him under her wing years ago. We hear Athena frequently reprimanding Odysseus for his mercy, and yet by the end, we see her turn to it, as Odysseus turns away. 

In ‘I Can’t Help But Wonder’, sung between Telemachus and Odysseus during their long-awaited reunion, Athena makes an appearance, and it is in her exchange with Odysseus that I believe lies the core of the musical. She says, 

“I can't help but wonder what this world could be

If we all held each other with a bit more empathy.”

To which Odysseus, who has thus far been forced to strip himself of his humanity to return to Penelope and Telemachus, responds, 

“If that world exists, it's far away from here

It's one I'll have to miss, for it's far beyond my years

You might live forever, so you can make it be

But I've got one endeavor, there's a girl I have to see.”

The trials laid before him by the gods, and Odysseus’ constant battle between protecting his men or himself, steadily bring him to the realization that no matter the bloodshed he tried to avoid post the war, death would follow. Odysseus’ being ‘just a man’ and therefore holding value for mortality is used against him repeatedly by the gods, so much so that his post-war decisions to avoid bloodshed, given how much has been spilt already, were ultimately met with Zeus making him choose between his own survival or that of his crew. This fate of being a pawn for the gods has ensured that Odysseus hones in on his ambition, his goal of returning home and seeing his family once more, no matter the cost. His being Athena’s “warrior of the mind”, revered for his intelligence, has him constantly calculating and on the lookout for what is to come, be it during the war or on the way home. 

Like Odysseus and his ever-advancing eye, human mortality drives our constant trial towards some ever-existing future goal–  the grade, the accolade, the job. The threat of our impending and inevitable demise causes the mad scramble to make it all happen, however improbable the chances of success. By the end Odysseus learns to prioritise his present, acknowledge his mortality, how small he is in the grand scheme of things, and the value of spending it with the woman he loves. If there is one thing I think this musical sheds light on, especially in this moment, it is finding the strength to acknowledge our anxieties of what the future may hold but not allowing the present which we inhabit to be ruled by a future that does not yet exist.

While this take may seem like a reach, it is in line with the purpose of the epic. Epics were meant to depict heroes with fabled battles and foes to create ideals to pursue, therefore giving them greatness while simultaneously humanising them with a hamartia; a fatal flaw. Herrans’ Odysseus however, is flawless in comparison to his Homeric counterpart. Be it a desire for Circe, and maybe Calypso, the need to uphold his code, or the choice to abandon his devotion to his men to embrace his family, temptation marred the Homeric Odysseus' journey from its Genesis. Odysseus’ constant battle against temptation is foundational to the tale as it was meant to offer its audience a hero to whom they ought to strive, but a de-pedestalisation of the hero by virtue of him caving to temptation and reaping the consequences of it. Through the lens of time and cultural difference, much of Odysseus’ actions need reparation to befit a hero of the modern lens. However, Herrans choosing to eliminate some of these, be it to fit Odysseus into the box of contemporary hero or in the interest of time, washes out the complexity of such a character by framing him into a cookie-cutter good guy with a hero complex, his only shortcomings being a product of divine intervention and the choicelessness of fate. 

This choicelessness that takes precedence in Herrans’ reading of the Odyssey, enabling the loss of some of these complexities, however, then serves to highlight the one choice Odysseus does make, his choice to hold onto what is and not what could be. Criticisms of EPIC’s flaws lie in the same vein as those of most Greek retellings; in their failure to accurately reproduce the source and the liberties taken by writers. Yet Herrans ensures that at least the essence of the epic, in its ability to impart some wisdom and create a space for interpretation, is unyielding. 

(Edited by Giya Sood and Maya Ribeiro.)