ENGELBERT Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel,” which returned to the Metropolitan Opera this week in a completely new production, is a strange if beguiling piece of work.
It’s a fairy-tale opera, handsomely plumped up with Wagnerian-style music – Wagner was Humperdinck’s mentor – and the Grimm tale of children lost in a witch’s wood is made less grim by a libretto liberally sugaring the original, introducing a comforting mock religiosity to a virtually pagan theme.
Musically, the performance went well. Vladimir Jurowski, principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and music director of Britain’s Glyndebourne Opera, superbly handled his Wagnerian-size orchestra as if it were playing “Tristan,” which is absolutely right.
Unfortunately, the text is crassly translated into English by David Pountney, presumably to make it more accessible to children – though the management’s doubts as to its usefulness were registered by its use of surtitles.
Why not also use the original German, if people need titles to understand the English?
The cast was brilliantly led by the British tenor Philip Langridge as the flesh-eating witch, singing with a perfect edge and dolled up in motherly drag, like a sinister Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire.”
The children she hopes to have for supper – after being baked into gingerbread – were fast-rising British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, exceptional as a boyish Hansel, and sweet-voiced German soprano Christine Schafer as the resourceful Gretel.
All (apart from that clumsy English translation) would have been fine, but the grit in the gingerbread is Richard Jones’ pretentious staging, aided and abetted by Scottish designer John Macfarlane.
The London-born Jones is one of Europe’s leading opera directors. This “Hansel and Gretel” started life with the Welsh National Opera and later appeared at Chicago’s Lyric Opera. It is original beyond the point of desperation.
Jones has concluded that the theme of this fairy-tale opera is “HUNGER,” in capital letters and probably italicized. He seems to have adopted a Brechtian theme of “a man gets to eat or gets to be eaten.”
So he and Macfarlane have placed the three acts of the opera in three kitchens.
Even the darkling forest is a kitchen, and Humperdinck’s angels are waiters serving the hungry kids food in silver chafing dishes, supervised by a surrealistic headwaiter whose top half is a supercilious fish. All very cute – but not Humperdinck cute.
It’s a pity that such a superior musical performance should be so undercut by its staging. Perhaps the Met is counting on its broadcast potential, where no one can see what’s happening.
HANSEL AND GRETEL
Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000. Performances through Jan. 31.