Surrealism tinges ‘Hansel and Gretel’ at Metropolitan Opera

By MIKE SILVERMAN

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

NEW YORK — The very first image we see in the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Hansel and Gretel” is a drawing of an empty plate projected on the curtain with knife and fork on either side.

It’s a reminder that hunger is never far from the minds, or stomachs, of the characters in Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera — a theme that dominates the imaginative, at times surreal, staging by Richard Jones that premiered Monday afternoon. (“Hansel and Gretel” can be seen at 1 p.m. Jan. 1 at Tinseltown in Boardman as part of the Met’s Live in High-Definition series. Tickets are $22 at the theater box office).

It’s Act 2 that finds Jones and set and costume designer John Macfarlane at their most audacious and inspired. This is the scene set in the haunted forest where Hansel and Gretel have been sent by their mother to find strawberries for supper.

Instead of a traditional woodsy setting, we see a large room with a long, bare table in the center, a chandelier made of deer antlers, and walls that are papered with pictures of trees and lined with men who have branches projecting from their heads.

When the lost children settle down to sleep at the foot of the table, instead of 14 angels assembling to watch over them, their guardians are a comically grotesque crew of 14 chefs with oversize hats and inflatable balloon faces. They slowly unfurl a long white tablecloth, then serve a sumptuous meal on silver platters, while the children dress in finery and a frog butler lights the candles.

Perhaps in an effort to restore some of the harsh realism that Humperdinck and his librettist sister Adelheid Wette stripped from the original tale by the Brothers Grimm, Jones introduces a couple of ill-advised touches: the children’s mother nearly swallows pills in a suicide attempt, and the father at one point raises his hand to strike her.