Happy Ending for ‘Hansel and Gretel’

In Garrison Keillor’s quizzical opinion, the Grimm Brothers’ scary story of Hansel and Gretel may have “put us off going out to have a wilderness experience” and given “a terrible view of family values,” but as the theme for the benefit, “An Evening of Enchantment on Stage at the Opera,” it proved charming.

The party was Saturday night onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, amid the sets for Humperdinck’s opera “Hansel and Gretel,” which completed its run of performances Sunday.

“I could have worn my dirndl from Salzburg,” reflected Franscesca Stanfill Tufo as she noted a number of men in the black-tie crowd wearing Bavarian jackets. In town from New York “for a Father’s Day visit,” Tufo joined her parents, Terry and Dennis Stanfill, and other faithful supporters of the Los Angeles Music Center Opera--among them Hannah and Edward Carter, Flora Thornton and Nancy and Ron Arnault--at the fund-raiser.

Humorist Keillor and mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade provided the entertainment, served up between the sauerbraten-style filet mignon and the gingerbread cookies.

As the evening began, a party mood was ignited by tenor Ragnar Ulfung in his guise as the Witch from the opera. He swept down the staircase of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, setting off a gleeful cacophony of squeals and screams from the girls and boys of the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, who had been singing for the cocktail crowd. Onstage, a gingerbread house, a picket fence of gingerbread children, a wall of angels and a forest--the sets from the production--framed the dining area, while a faux witch flew her broomstick over tables decorated with non-edible gingerbread houses. (“Back home, gingerbread is something we give to our dog” quipped Keillor.)

The benefit evening, co-chaired by Georgianna Erskine and Joan Thompson, also included a silent auction featuring trips and tickets to opera productions around the world, from Helsinki to Santa Fe and New York to London.

Peter Hemmings, general director of the Music Center Opera, didn’t make a speech--he had taken care of the requisite thank-yous with a note in the written program--but introduced Keillor by reiterating his delight, when he first came to America from England eight years ago, in discovering “this voice on the radio which would go on and on and on about the most extraordinary happenings in the Midwest.”

Keillor’s witty ramblings wandered from a faux fable about the creation of rhubarb pie by a Pasadena couple in the 1930s to a parody of the habanera from “Carmen,” which placed Georges Bizet as a native of Omaha, Neb.

Keillor also accompanied Von Stade in a duet of “The Cat Came Back,” a song, he admitted, that doesn’t thrill animal activists. But the real musical treats were Von Stade’s spirited solos, including the “tipsy lady” aria “Ah, quel diner” from Offenbach’s “La Perichole” and a romantic rendering of Cole Porter’s great love song “Night and Day.”