HANSEL & GRETEL AT THE MET

We went to the opera at the Met on Christmas Eve, here is the NY Times review.

Children were everywhere at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday afternoon for a special Christmas Eve matinee, the premiere of a new production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel.” As patrons entered the house, some children scurried up and down the stairs of the grand promenade, while others peered over the rim of the orchestra pit to watch the musicians warm up. As the house lights dimmed, and the Met’s low-hanging crystal chandeliers ascended to the ceiling, impressionable children applauded. Indeed, applause broke out all through the performance, especially when the plucky Hansel and Gretel pushed the glutinous Witch into the oven during the final scene.

This new production, a surreal, sometimes baffling yet intriguing staging by the British director Richard Jones, was created for the Welsh National Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. It was brought to the Met by the general manager, Peter Gelb, as this season’s special family fare. Last season’s family offering was Julie Taymor’s production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” trimmed to 100 minutes and performed in English. Humperdinck’s compact opera needs no trimming; with an intermission the performance lasts just over two hours. It is performed in a very free English translation of the German by David Pountney, filled with clever rhymes and snappy vernacular.
The German soprano Christine Schäfer, whose only previous work at the Met was a string of shattering performances in the 2001-2 season as Berg’s voluptuous Lulu, makes a girlish and not-so-innocent Gretel. The dusky-voiced British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, who in the last two years has won admirers at the Met for her portrayals of Mozart’s Cherubino and Handel’s Sesto, sings Hansel, played as a boisterous, fidgety boy raging with hormones. In the pit is the brilliant young Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski. He conveys the lyricism of this 1893 opera while never letting us forget that Humperdinck was a Wagner protégé who filled this score with rich chromatic harmony and thick, dark orchestral colorings.

Though the opera was initially planned as a small-scale entertainment for children, it did not work out as envisioned. The libretto was written by Adelheid Wette, the composer’s sister, who was dismayed by the cruelty in the original story by the Brothers Grimm. So she softened the tale, removing some of its, well, grimness. The parents of the original, chronically poor and unable to feed their children, are driven to despair. Gertrude, the mother, persuades Peter, the father, to abandon the children in the forest, hoping they will be able to fend for themselves. The opera’s Gertrude, in a fit of anger over her lazy children, knocks over a jug of milk, the only nourishment in the family cupboard, and sends the siblings out to the forest to pick strawberries. There they become lost.

While Wette removed some grimness from the story, directors of the opera have just kept putting it back in. So does Mr. Jones in this high-concept production, with sets and costumes designed by John Macfarlane. To Mr. Jones hunger (and what it will drive people to do) is the work’s central theme. To achieve a kind of symmetry he sets all three acts in kitchens that combine modern imagery with expressionist touches.

The first act depicts the family’s depressing kitchen. With washed-out, peeling walls, an outmoded 1950s-style refrigerator and a wobbly table, the place looks like the Kramdens’ kitchen in “The Honeymooners.” The imagery is poignant, but there is a problem. Placed on the Met’s enormous proscenium stage, the kitchen is framed by blackness. The recessed set puts the singers to the back of the stage somewhat, which boxes in their voices. Though Ms. Coote and Ms. Schäfer sing with richness and sensitivity, they have trouble projecting. And their English diction is hopeless. Children who want to understand what is being sung will have to rely on their Met Titles.

Gertrude, played by the veteran mezzo-soprano Rosalind Plowright, is so distraught over her family’s poverty, her husband’s drinking and her own bursts of anger at the children that in a suicidal moment she nearly swallows a handful of pills, which seems a melodramatic touch. The raw power of her singing increases the harshness of the portrayal.
As Peter, the burnished baritone Alan Held has no trouble being heard. In this version he calls himself a “drunken sot,” and he looks the part of the burly tradesman who has finally had a run of luck in his brush maker business.

Before Act II begins there is a drop screen, all in garish red, that depicts a slurping mouth and jagged teeth; imagine a Francis Bacon painting of Mick Jagger’s tongue. When it lifts, the opera’s forest setting becomes a German Expressionist dining room, with leafy wallpaper and a long, empty banquet table. Trees are represented as surreal servants in black suits, with branches for heads.
After the starving children sing the well-known Evening Prayer (“When at Night I Go to Sleep”), they are visited, during the long Dream Pantomime for orchestra, not by 14 angels but by 14 fairy-tale chefs. These bulbous figures with huge masked heads, like characters out of a Maurice Sendak book, set the table with wondrous dishes. Surely Hansel and Gretel may have had dreams of food. But will children in the audience understand that this episode is a dream, or even that the scene takes place in a forest? Does that matter? Maybe not.

The Witch’s house in Act III is an industrial-size kitchen, with cinder-block walls and towering stainless-steel appliances, including a huge oven in which she bakes her child victims. In a casting coup, the Witch is sung by the British tenor Philip Langridge, who has a cackling laugh (like Mime the dwarf in “Siegfried”) and looks like a demented Julia Child, with a buxom build, bushy gray hair, a sleeveless black blouse and pearls. Like Child, the Witch is certainly willing to make a colossal mess on her kitchen table as she fattens up Hansel with cakes, puff pastries and gelatins.

Cannibalism runs through many fairy tales, this one especially. Still, it is a little unsettling at the end of this production, after the Witch is killed and the gingerbread children come back to life, to see the endearing youngsters of the Met’s wonderful children’s chorus take out crisply done witch bread from the oven, lay it on the table and ready their forks and knives to dig in.
Mr. Jurowski’s work is impressive. Humperdinck’s Wagnerian score abounds in singable, justly loved tunes, and Mr. Jurowski finds a judicious balance between weight and whimsy in his subtly paced performance, drawing rich textures and inner voices from the orchestra.

Though the production was befuddling to me, the twitters and applause from the children in the house suggested that Mr. Jones may have a good reading of the sensibilities of his target audience. During curtain calls the children especially cheered Mr. Langridge’s daffy Witch. Some things never change.