Review: San Diego Opera’s charming ‘Hansel and Gretel’ short on arias but rich in imagination

Opera isn’t an art form that lends itself well to today’s short-attention-span youth. But the charming, colorful and imaginative production of “Hansel and Gretel” that opened Saturday at the San Diego Civic Theatre hits the sweet spot by bringing out the kid in everyone.

It has been 21 years since San Diego Opera last produced Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 opera, which retells the well-known Grimm’s fairy tale with a rich but playful score. This year’s production — borrowed from Vancouver Opera, with Canadian director Brenna Corner reprising her original staging — is so visually intoxicating that even the 5-year-old girl in front of me was silently transfixed from the first note to the last.

For opera fans who live for grand sweeping arias, “Hansel and Gretel” comes up short. Humperdinck’s score services the story, so a fair amount of the sung music is either recitative, written in the style of a children’s song or performed in a character voice. But there are still several vocal highlights and conductor Ari Pelto makes a confident company debut leading the San Diego Symphony.

Corner has created a storybook staging that opens and closes with a boy reading the book of Grimm’s tales. The San Diego Opera’s children’s chorus wear shirts that spell out “Once upon a time ...” and the oversize scenery resembles a pop-up children’s book.

Puppetry designed by Alberta’s Old Trout Puppet Workshop plays a central role in this staging. There’s shadow puppetry during the overture; giant trees with blinking eyes; strange moss-covered woodland creatures in the forest; glowing angels that look like floating jellyfish; a Sandman with disconnected eyes and ears; and a giant hulking red witch that requires two people to operate.

Mezzo-soprano Blythe Gaissert and soprano Sara Gartland co-star as siblings Hansel and Gretel, respectively, who get lost in the woods and are captured by the evil witch who plans to fatten them up and eat them. Gartland gets the lion’s share of the aria moments and sings them with beauty and expressiveness, particularly her second-act solo “A little man stands in the forest.”

Gaissert’s role is less showy vocally, with no stand-alone songs, but she’s hilarious as the fidgety, irrepressible kid brother who regularly breaks out in the floss dance whenever he gets excited. With Gartland, she harmonizes beautifully in the opera’s most familiar number,”Brother come dance with me.”

Tenor Joel Sorenson does double duty as singer and puppeteer as the Witch. It’s a highly physical role that he sings with playful theatricality in the number “Hurr, hopp, hurr, hopp.” Baritone Malcolm MacKenzie, starring as Hansel and Gretel’s dad, Peter, delivers the opera’s most ear-pleasing performance, the aria “Oh, we poor people.” Soprano Marcy Stonikas plays their mother, Gertrude, and soprano Devon Guthrie plays the Sandman and Dew Fairy.

This production of “Hansel and Gretel” is performed in English with English supertitles projected above the stage. The libretto translation from its original German is clear and concise and in rhyming couplets. Without the usual repetitive verses heard in most operas, “Hansel and Gretel” is short and direct, running just over two hours, including a 20-minute intermission.

For parents with grade-school-age children, “Hansel and Gretel” is a magical introduction to the art form. Traditional aria lovers may want to wait for this spring’s “The Barber of Seville,” which would also be a terrific second opera for children who get hooked.

“Hansel and Gretel”

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and Feb. 14, 2 p.m. Feb. 16.

Where: San Diego Opera at the San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 B St., San Diego

Tickets: $49 and up

Phone: (619) 533-7000

Online: sdopera.org