‘Hadestown’ and ‘The Ferryman’ get Tonys love

“Hadestown,” a folk-and-blues-inflected musical reimagining the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, led the Tony nominations on Tuesday, winning nods in 14 categories and becoming a front-runner in the hotly contested, and financially significant, race for the season’s best new musical.

An unconventional show nurtured by the downtown theater scene — sung-through, poetic, packed with emotion and politics — “Hadestown” will now face off against four others for the big prize. “Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of the Temptations,” an exuberantly sung and danced jukebox musical, garnered 12 nominations; “Tootsie,” a musical comedy adapted from the popular film but updated to reflect today’s gender politics, got 11. “Beetlejuice,” another movie adaptation, scared up eight nominations; and “The Prom,” about egotistic New York actors who insert themselves into a debate about sexuality at an Indiana high school, received seven.

“I can’t believe this is real — I never expected that this road was going to lead here,” said the singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, who fell in love with the Greek myth as a child and then, a dozen years ago, adapted it for the stage in a DIY-production that she packed into a silver school bus and toured around community theaters in Vermont.

Now she is a two-time Tony nominee, for the show’s book and score. “I just got captivated by the idea that there’s this character who believed that if he could make a piece of art beautiful enough, he could change the world,” she said.