Hansel and Gretel - Metropolitan Opera, New York, 8 January 2007
Outside the Met before the show
There've been complaints from critics that this production is too scary, not sugary enough to bring the kids to. (Not quite as scary as the $3,550 (=£1,800) the Met wants you to pay for family tickets and a bed for the night though.) The sprinkling of children in my area of the audience seemed riveted, not at all perturbed. In truth I could see little that would bother any but those who are too young for a full night out at the opera anyway. The central themes of starvation and cannibalism (seasoned with child abuse and wife beating) are handled with engaging restraint. I did overhear some grannies on the way out who felt short-changed by the lack of a gingerbread house and a forest. It's probably this generation, who've perhaps seen a more literal take before, who are most likely to feel disappointed. But I've avoided it in the past for precisely the opposite reason, so this was my very first Hansel and Gretel.
It's immediately recognisable as a Richard Jones production from the shoebox set and sixties decor unveiled for the first act. The set, a dilapidated kitchen, is cleverly constructed so that it's higher and wider at the front than the back. This lends a surreal, unsettling depth to the visual, and makes the performers at the rear of the stage (the parents) seem suitably larger than the ones at the front (the children, played of course by adults). Manic movement compensated for the rather opaque written characterisations. Alice Coote presented Hansel as a typically boisterous small boy, charging around bull-headed, and Christine Schäfer's Gretel was a sweet and bashful little girl. The action (and there's lots of it) is precision-choreographed. Having recently seen rather too many Wagnerians shuffling cluelessly around the stage like sheepish auditionees, it was a delight to see some proper stage blocking for a change.
Although this production is in English, Coote and Schäfer's slurry diction made me grateful for the Met's seat-back subtitles (seatitles?). The problem was shared, to a lesser extent, by the rest of the cast. But then this is the case with so many English-language productions I've seen (like, just about everything at the ENO) that I have to wonder if it's a problem with the language itself as much as the singers. Especially for sopranos, it's tough to get the syllables across cleanly.
The second act is set in another expanding box, this one taller and more threatening, its forest setting evoked by dark leafy wallpaper
and a tree branch chandelier.
Nodding trees around the sides are revealed as actors in uncomfortable headgear, and there are more actors, grotesque chefs who advance to set the giant banqueting table in the children's dream sequence, and a bizarre fish-headed waiter who rises out of the floor. Sasha Cooke (a slightly scary old-guy Sandman) and Lisette Oropesa (the Dew Fairy) get some of the prettiest music in the opera, and delivered really charming cameos here.
The third act began not with the expected gingerbread house, but with a giant cake-bearing mouth that led in to the witch's kitchen, a huge food factory complete with enormous oven. Due to illness, the scheduled Witch, Philip Langridge, was replaced by Adam Klein. Prosthetically tubbified, he delivered such an appropriately beguiling performance that I didn't miss Langridge at all.
The visuals are so breathtaking and consistently engaging that the music could almost take a back seat. But Vladimir Jurowski conducted the Met orchestra (sounding considerably more vigorous than they had in the previous night's Die Walküre) with a drive and attention to detail that underlined that this is not the glorified panto some might like it to be.
Courtesy of Welsh National Opera, who originally commissioned it, this production (different cast) can be seen in Cardiff and Birmingham this summer.
Mr and Mrs Jurowski and the kids: 
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