It’s the Holidays and Time for History’s Dark Fairy Tale Champs, Hansel and Gretel

Hansel & Gretel
Metropolitan Opera
Lincoln Center
New York, N.Y.

If it’s the holiday season, it’s time for a bevy of Nutcrackers and a few productions of the more than one-hundred-year-old opera Hansel & Gretel, a dark and sinister story, written as an historical folk tale, about witches murdering children written back in the 1690s that manages to delight and scare people today.

Hansel & Gretel is a story soaked in history that began as a folk tale three hundred years ago in Germany.  The basic story was so popular, and struck so many cultural chords, that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, two German professors, rewrote it for a collection of fairy tales they published in their first book in 1812.  The Brothers Grimm, two respected academics and historical figures, later published a series of books on fairy tales, such as Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, and Cinderella.  The books sold millions of copies, their fame spread far and wide, and today the Brothers Grimm are considered the fathers of the fairy tale.

Hansel & Gretel was turned into an opera by Engelbert Humperdinck in 1893.  It had its American premier at the Metropolitan Opera, in New York, in 1895.  Over the years, there have been several musical recordings of the opera.  It has been shown on television numerous times and several film and TV producers have turned it into a full length story (Hansel & Gretel: an Opera Fantasy).  Cartoon producers, especially Walt Disney, have used the story as a rewritten fable or part of a series of cartoons tied to fairy tales.

New York’s Metropolitan Opera has staged it each holiday season for years.  This year’s production is a holiday feast, a grand and delightful opera, in English, that is a delight for the young and the young at heart.  Anyone who thinks opera is a stage full of men and women singing weepy Italian music must see Hansel & Gretel.  You want fun?  This opera is it.

One of the main reasons I wanted to see the opera again is because today television is home to the Brothers Grimm and their fairy tale creations.  The brothers are the cops who star in an innovative, macabre new Friday night NBC series, Grimm.  The two modern detectives, mysteriously related to the fairy tale authors, solve crimes whose plots are modernized versions of the Grimm tales.  A December 9 episode, for example, was a reverse version of The Three Little Pigs.  In it, three piggish-looking people are murdered and the Grimms have to solve the case.  Throughout the show, the pigs are turned into men with pig faces, to scary music.  Perhaps Hansel & Gretel will be turned into one of their stories and if the police will be looking through the mean streets of Los Angeles for the Wicked Witch and her forest cottage.

Hansel and Gretel, like many other fairy tales, uses real historical events as the basis for its story.  In the opera, a husband and wife in Germany have little money and find themselves in the middle of a seventeenth-century recession, complaining about high food prices.  The story was written during a time in European history when the continent was crippled by bad finances and many families found themselves in that same situation.  Germany was also a land of deep, thick forests, so the realistic historic landscape became the stage for the folk tale Hansel and Gretel.

Over the years, the story has been changed. The first, and most morbid version, had the husband and wife taking their kids, Hansel and Gretel, deep into the forest and leaving them there, eager to get rid of two more mouths to feed (many fairy tales written in that error were menacing and most were changed over the years).  A later version had the mother sending them into the forest for strawberries and losing them.  This latest version at the Met has the kids running off into the forest on their own and getting lost.

Food and hunger are still main cogs in the fairy tale’s plot.  The lost Hansel and Gretel, eleven or twelve years old, stuff themselves on strawberries they discover, and then find themselves at a huge feast prepared by a dozen chefs, who amble about on stage in high white hats and thick, pudgy face masks, along with a life-sized fish.  Next comes a huge chocolate cake that the brother and sister try to devour and, finally, a feast at the cottage of the Wicked Witch.  She is not feting them; she is trying to fatten them up to kill them and turn them into gingerbread cookies that she will eat.

Will she succeed?  Will the children find out her evil plan?  Can they save themselves?  Will they be rescued at the last minute?  Thousands of kids and their parents sit bolt upright at the Met trying to figure that out each year.

The splendid staging of Hansel & Gretel at the Met is a joy for the whole family.  You can bring the kids or grandkids or just go yourself, eyes a bit wider than usual and your suspension of disbelief longer than the George Washington Bridge.

Conductor Robin Ticciati supervised the boisterous orchestra.  The overall production was overseen by Richard Jones, with assistance from choreographer Linda Dobell and stage director Eric Einhorn.

Heidi Stober, as Gretel, and Kate Lindsey, as Hansel, are the perky stars of the opera.  They are strong singers and marvelous actors who bound about the large stage and make the oversized production seen quite compact.  The pair is especially delightful in the opening scene, when they deride each other as they dance through a kitchen.  They are aided by the talented Michaela Martens and Dwayne Croft as their mom and dad, Jennifer Johnson Cano as the Sandman, Ashley Emerson as the Dew Fairy and the frightening and wonderful Robert Brubaker as the very scary witch.  The singers are joined by the Met’s Children’s Chorus, led by director Anthony Piccolo.

The sets are spectacular, topped by the witch’s cottage and her oversized oven that appears as wide as the Lincoln Tunnel.  There are also dazzling scrims that include huge portraits of dinner plates, some apparently bloodied, nasty open mouths featuring frightening teeth and one mouth with an opening that the massive chocolate cake is pushed through on a huge red tongue. The scrims are sinister but memorable.  The opera runs through January 7.

Will there ever be an end to productions of Hansel & Gretel and the other Grimm fairy tales that helped to explore the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?  Will these folk tales disappear as children have a new world full of video game villains, computer monsters and 3-D bad guys?

I don’t know, but I’m sure of one thing—two hundred years from now, thanks to the Brothers Grimm, kids are still going to be scared to walk into a dark wood late at night and think twice every time they bite into a gingerbread cookie.  The ugly old witch might still be in a house somewhere in the woods to toss them into an oven.

PRODUCTION: Producers: Metropolitan Opera, Sets and Costumes: John Macfarlane, Lighting: Jennifer Tipton, Choreographer: Linda Dobell, Stage Director: Eric Einhorn

Bruce Chadwick can be reached at bchadwick@njcu.edu.