How grim do you like your Grimms? If you prefer the sweet, soft touch that Disney animated features have lent to the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, then you might not care for Minnesota Opera’s current production of “Hansel and Gretel.” But if you don’t mind something creepier and closer in tone to the original story about lost children and a cannibalistic witch, then this might be the staging for you.
But, one way or another, you should find the music marvelously satisfying. Engelbert Humperdinck’s operatic take on the tale is filled with some of the best earworms in the art form, lovely, lyrical and lush in orchestration. And the cast and orchestra of Minnesota Opera’s production make the score sumptuous and sweet as a gingerbread house. It’s also acted as engagingly as it’s sung, especially by the two at the fore, who make for quite convincing kids.
Director Doug Varone helped create a memorably spooky version of Charles Gounod’s “Faust” for Minnesota Opera in 2009, and, early on, this production seems similarly spine-tingling. In an urban American neighborhood of the 1930s, children are playing jump rope and hopscotch before a traveling circus comes through and coaxes them to check out the show. Soon, we learn that the acrobats, clowns and carnies are abducting kids for that nasty witch’s culinary pleasure, the Zenon Dance Company members smiling warmly then turning away and sneering with disgust.
Audience members may become doubly troubled by these icky doings because the title characters are such charming protagonists. Angela Mortellaro’s Gretel and Stephanie Lauricella’s Hansel are very fun kids, she a cherubic, sweet-voiced innocent, “he” a gangly goofball. Brimming with believable awkwardness and antsy playfulness, the two are such engaging companions that you may start missing them when they’re offstage (which is mercifully seldom).
Yet the strongest voice in the production belongs to mezzo Marianne Cornetti, who holds down two roles. Yes, she’s the witch in the final act, but her version of Hansel and Gretel’s mother is even scarier, for she displays the earmarks of an abusive parent, the kind of loose cannon who inspires considerably more fear than affection in her children. By contrast, Cornetti’s witch is clad in a bright yellow, red-polka-dotted “Pagliacci”-style clown outfit that makes her none too daunting. Once we’re in her kitchen — which she commandeers as if hosting a cooking show — it never feels as if a happy ending is too far away.
Perhaps that’s because of the delightful pre-intermission finale that expands upon the “Evening Prayer” by taking us inside Hansel and Gretel’s dreams, where five incarnations of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers swirl about them in formal attire. Throw in a cameo by one of their Hollywood contemporaries and all the darkness of the first act seems swept away for the duration of the evening.
So, after some chilling early moments, this “Hansel and Gretel” ends up being not nearly as unsettling as the Grimms’ original. And that allows you to engage more comfortably in the delight of Humperdinck’s music, which is brought into beautiful, full-bodied balance by conductor Anne Manson. This opera’s orchestrations are so grand that they can overpower the singers in some productions, but not this one. It’s a well-thought-out interpretation, Varone’s choreography ably executed by the Zenon dancers and David Zinn’s sets of dreaminess and decay giving the audience an eyeful.
Rob Hubbard can be reached at rhubbard@pioneerpress.com.
What: Minnesota Opera’s “Hansel and Gretel”
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday
Where: Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, 345 Washington St., St. Paul
Tickets: $200-$25, available at 612-333-6669 or mnopera.org
Capsule: The score’s sweetness sweeps the Grimm darkness away.
