Austin Lyric Opera 'Hansel and Gretel'
Whose house is this? Rhymes with 'rich'
April 28, 2010
Liz Cass as the witch
in ALO's staging of "Hansel and Gretel." Photo by Mark Matson, courtesy
of ALO.
Stage director David Grabarkewitz recreated the staging originally conceived by James Robinson for New York City Opera and first produced there in 1998. In this concept, the action takes place in Manhattan in 1893, the year of the opera’s premiere. The young children and their parents are German immigrants living in a Lower East Side tenement, the mother sends the kids to pick strawberries in Central Park, the angels who watch over the sleeping children are ordinary New York promenaders dressed all in white, and the witch is a wealthy, crimson-robed grande dame living in a Fifth Avenue mansion. Most of the text is sung in Cori Ellison’s breezy, sometimes sassy contemporary English translation, but passages that Humperdinck derived from folk songs were sung in German -- an intriguing way to underscore the immigrant experience at the core of the production concept.
Set designer John Conklin’s cramped, cluttered, amply detailed tenement flat in Act I contrasted tellingly with the Act III mansion, its high interior walls covered with portraits of the witch's previous entrées. Her kitchen is equipped with an enormous, elaborately ornamented stove. In Act II, Central Park is conceived as a snow-globe scene.
Lighting designer Barry Steele’s projections of historic New York streetscapes (on a scrim that didn’t hang flat enough) carry Hansel and Gretel uptown to Central Park, and when they settle down to sleep another projection creates a magical apotheosis effect. Apart from the wizardly projections, the lighting was too often flat and unremarkable, however. Anna Ruth Oliver's period costumes were fully convincing.
Richard Buckley lavished his customary care for shape and pacing on the Wagner-manqué score. The most complex music, depicting the terrors of the forest, was very effectively rendered.
The singing was pretty good. Top marks go to mezzo-soprano Liz Cass, who brought dramatic heft and brilliance to the roles of the mother and the witch, and to mezzo-soprano Adriana Zabala for her warm Hansel. Patches of uneven vocal color intruded on an otherwise fine performance by soprano Alicia Berneche as Gretel. Baritone David Small was a sturdy father. The children’s chorus sounded terrific.
“Hansel and Gretel” continues April 28 and 30 at 7:30 pm and May 2 at 3 pm in Austin’s Long Center. See austinlyricopera.org
Mike
Greenberg