This review is from 2018; Hansel and Gretel returns for 2024.
Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 opera for kids is as warm as a witch’s kitchen, and as dark as the forest outside. It swaps the Grimm Brothers’ fairytale’s wicked child-abandoning parents for a desperately poor couple who send their kids into the forest in a much-regretted flash of anger. And Antony McDonald’s stylish new production mixes in more than enough wit to leaven the bleakness of black forest poverty.
The witch’s gingerbread house is a masterstroke: a lopsided cottage impaled with a giant knife that might just have been a warning to savvier kids than these two. But Humperdinck’s parent-provoking children are a refreshingly naughty antidote to all the saintly moppets that fill Victorian fiction. They gobble strawberries and leap up to tramp folk dances across the kitchen table. These stamping, finger-clicking scenes are probably the most German thing you’ll ever see outside a beer hall, and they make for moments of gutsy energy in a score that’s otherwise all about lush, rich romanticism.
It might be nominally aimed at kids, but ‘Hansel and Gretel’ is musically complex, and its central duo are played by adult performers Hanna Hipp and Jennifer Davis. They mix knockabout tomfoolery with beautifully blending soprano voices that soar through the towering darkness of the forest – a place that hides a magical array of leaping woodland animals and fairy story characters who play in the shadows.
The only...
