Taking the Grimness Out of Grimm

“Hansel and Gretel” is the perfect holiday confection of an opera, a rich musical pudding of sugar and spice. The story is not nearly so bloodthirsty or grim as the original Grimm. Engelbert Humperdinck’s warm, wondrously enrapturing score links Wagner-drunk harmonies to simple tunes and a PG-rated fairy tale. Mom’s a terror and Dad’s a lush--but she’s no longer a wicked stepmother, and drink makes him merry. The kids are lovable brats. The wicked Witch is comic. Goodness watches over the world in the form of a Sandman, a Dew Fairy and a host of angels. Even a penchant for realistic modern staging that underlines any dark or brutal implications in the libretto can’t normally dampen this opera’s lovely spirits.

Unless one thinks too hard. This is, after all, Wagnerian opera about incinerating children in ovens.

Los Angeles Opera’s new production, unveiled at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Wednesday night, begins by thinking hard. As the overture--which the composer intended as a brief romp through the children’s life--begins the enchantment, old framed photographs of children are projected on the scrim. The music couldn’t be more insinuating, yet already there is the implication of real victims.

Director James Robinson sets the story in the New York of 1890 (contemporaneous with the composition of the opera). Hansel and Gretel are poor immigrant children on the Lower East Side. The woods into which they are sent out to forage is Central Park. The Witch is an Upper East Side society matron. There are, in this conceit, some clever touches and some curious ones.

The production (a collaboration with New York City Opera, which presented it last year) moves from stark realism to camp fantasy. Ragamuffin Hansel and Gretel are confined to a claustrophobic tenement apartment, which in John Conklin’s set is a postage-stamp frame floating in the middle of a large black stage. Snowy Central Park is a more idyllic round globe. The Sandman, who puts the cold, tired kids to sleep in the park, is a homeless person. The Witch is an amusing grotesque, a lascivious gourmand with her enormous gilded oven.

Among the oddities are the angels--elegant, self-involved wealthy families in summer whites with parasols on a Sunday afternoon park stroll. An idyllic scene, but hardly a comforting vision of caring guardian spirits. The campy Witch is hilarious, singing hocus-pocus as she literally focuses an evil eye on the children, photographing them for her “specimen” portrait collection on the wall. But it is a chilling moment when Hansel and Gretel, after throwing the Witch into the oven, notice the portraits; the wall closes in on them and they suddenly begin to violently weep.

Another conceit is language. Old World parents sing German, Hansel and Gretel sing a mixture of German and English (old folk songs in their original language but dialogue mostly English), while the Americans sing in a colloquial English translated by the director. This could probably work well, but unfortunately so few words, English or German, can be understood that it isn’t always easy to tell the language. So this becomes another translation show, eyes rising continually to the projected titles.

The cast has one ideal singer--Paula Rasmussen as Hansel. She looks the boy; she acts the boy, mischievous guile with an undercurrent of vulnerability; she sings the boy with a lucid tone and is the the one singer who enunciates text clearly. Clare Gormley is a boisterous Gretel, eagerly acted, but less girlish is the mature, vibrato-laden voice. Lesley Leighton and John Atkins, as Gertrude and Peter (the mother and father), make little impression. Megan Dey-Toth and Catherine Ireland are pretty singers for the Sandman and Dew Fairy. Judith Christin falls right in with the long tradition of witches who are entertaining for their caricatures, not voices.

This is not a production that communicates music strongly. Sound often seems distant and indistinct. Some of that may be psychological; the tenement room appears small and distant, and maybe we then perceive the singers that way too. But the orchestra, which was conducted by William Vendice, sounded meek all night. Tempos were slow but considered, and phrasing was careful. But the orchestral playing, thin and poorly balanced, was surprisingly inattentive.

Los Angeles Opera has become adept at filling the theater by performing crowd-pleasing favorites, well done or not. “Hansel and Gretel,” family fare, probably seemed a sure thing. But Wednesday night there weren’t many children in evidence, and there were many empty seats.

*

* “Hansel and Gretel” continues Saturday at 1 p.m.; Sunday at 7:30 p.m.; Tuesday, Wednesday and Dec. 17 at 7:30 p.m.; Dec. 19 at 1 p.m.; and Dec. 21 at 7:30 p.m. $27-$146, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 972-8001.