Hansel and Gretel, Opera San Jose, Nov. 24 2013

According to operabase.com, Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera Hansel and Gretel is the most-performed opera by a German composer. (Remember that Mozart and Johann Strauss are Austrian. Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman takes second place among operas by German composers.) This position on the operatic hit parade may be due to the fact that Germany is responsible for 30% of all recorded performances, and that Hansel and Gretel at Christmas in Germany is the moral equivalent of The Nutcracker ballet in the US.

Opera San Jose last presented Hansel and Gretel in the Montgomery Theater in 1986, just before I started attending. This production was in the much larger California Theatre. The sets were charming. In Act 1, we saw just one wall, the back wall, of Hansel and Gretel’s home, with a small raised platform for a floor. Furniture (a bunk bed and a table and chairs) was built from natural-looking branches that a woodcutter might have found in the forest and stripped of their bark. The forest outside the house was represented by a series of flat drops on the left and right sides of the stage, each drop painted to look like a tree, darker trees in front and lighter-colored in the rear. The effect was like a long tree-tunnel, and conveyed just a bit of a sense of the foreboding forest. For Act 2, the house was removed, leaving just the tree-tunnel. The 14 angels called for in the score were children dressed in dark gowns and accompanied by the figure of Mother Nature in a lovely green gown. For Act 3, the witch’s gingerbread house was another flat dropped onto the stage, with candy canes and frosting, and two rows of child-size gingerbread men. The staging challenge of having the witch fly around the stage on her broom was met by having the witch ride around the stage on her Segway scooter, which brought the expected chuckles from the audience. Another highlight was the oven that the witch tried to get Gretel to climb into. The basic concept came from a species of deep sea fish with lots of prominent teeth. The witch’s oven looked like a giant head mostly given over to tremendously long black teeth, and two glowing eyes on top; these eyes went dead when the oven blew up after the witch had been tricked into it and Gretel shut the oven door (the teeth) on her.

Our cast:
Hansel: Lisa Chavez
Gretel: Cecilia Violetta Lopez
Mother: Nicole Birkland
Father: Evan Brummel
Sandman: Chloe Smart
Dew Fairy: Christine Capsuto
Witch: Marc Schreiner
Mother Nature: Rita Elizabeth Horiguchi
Conductor: Andrew Whitfield
Director: Layna Chianakas (yes, the former resident artist)

You may have heard of “pants roles,” in which a woman, typically a mezzoo-soprano, sings the role of a young man such as Cherubino, Octavian, or Prince Orlofsky. Well, here we have a “skirt role,” in which a man sings a woman’s part, the witch. Schreiner was very effective in this role. Horiguchi was beatific as Mother Nature, a non-singing role not actually in the score but created for this production by the director. The remainder sang well, though the musical interest in this opera lies mainly in the orchestra. Humperdinck was a disciple of Richard Wagner, and made extensive use of the leitmotif concept. A worthwhile afternoon, but barely a beta.