The dark forest comes alive

DIRECTOR-DESIGNER Douglas Fitch may be in his 40s, but he’s on very close terms with his inner 10-year-old. At a costume fitting for his production of “Hansel and Gretel,” opening next Sunday at Los Angeles Opera, Fitch is ebullient.

First, there is a tall totem pole-like creature, resembling a bear with an owl sitting on top and an extra set of arms. Next, there is the forest gnome, a squiggly-wiggly-legged fellow with a rounded body. Despite his wacky proportions and an inner harness, it looks as though the gnome is going to be able to move about freely after all.

In short, the process is far from complete, but the animals are coming to life. “We’re talking about taking the hump down just a little bit,” Fitch says of the gnome. “But, wow, it’s amazing. It’s going to work. I’m so thrilled.”

He has a right to his delight. It’s been no mean feat, but the L.A. Opera costume shop seems to have achieved the near impossible. “When working with Doug, his imagination has no limits, and therefore the inspiration to produce totally magical costume looks is enormous,” says company costume director Jennifer Green.

Indeed, Fitch is no stranger to the fanciful. Conductor Alan Gilbert, who has known the director-designer for years, says it’s the dualities of Fitch’s work he most admires. “He has a childlike imagination informed by a Freudian understanding,” says Gilbert.

And that combination is what this new “Hansel and Gretel” will be all about. Originally written in German, the opera will be sung in a new English libretto by Richard Sparks with supertitles. Starring Lucy Schaufer (Hansel) and Maria Kanyova (Gretel), it will receive eight performances, half of them matinees.

The strategy is clearly aimed at attracting a family audience. “It was meant to be a ‘Nutcracker’ for L.A. Opera -- a portal into the opera for children or others for whom the art form seemed intimidating,” says Christopher Koelsch, the company’s director of artistic planning. What the “Nutcracker” example also suggests is a reliable cash cow, based on a familiar story, that can be trotted out each holiday season.

And although this won’t be a traditional “Hansel and Gretel,” the basic story and its universal appeal remain unchanged.

“The opera is really about this growth that we all have to make, over and over again in our lives, becoming more comfortable inside ourselves,” says Fitch. “And what that really means is leaning into discomfort. You have to go through the dark forest in order to get to the other side. And something bad might happen. But you’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t do that. So I’ve been calling this forest a metaphorest -- the realm of transformation.”

By late October, seeing the metaphorest still takes some imagination. In an upstairs rehearsal room at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, it is all but invisible, with chairs and a small table standing in for what will eventually become a mound in the midst of an outsized magical mushroom forest.

It’s a critical scene for the wayward siblings. “Up until now, they’ve always been together, and then when Hansel admits that he’s lost, Gretel starts to shift a little bit and takes responsibility differently,” the director explains.

So they work through the section of the score several times, with Fitch shaping Schaufer and Kanyova’s movements to best convey this transitional moment. By the third time through, the performers are on the floor, in front of the makeshift mound, separated from each other and literally leaning into that very discomfort that Fitch believes is key to the tale’s message.

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From a Grimm beginning

GERMAN composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s best-known work, “Hansel and Gretel” is based on the Grimm fairy tale. First performed in 1893, it tells of a brother and sister who are sent out to find food and get lost in the woods, where there’s a witch who bakes children in her oven. Hansel and Gretel outsmart the witch and release the many other children she has turned into gingerbread.

For Fitch, it’s a tale he’s long been waiting to tell. “It seems in many ways destined,” he says, “just because there are so many elements of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ in my own life.”

One element dates to his boyhood in Coventry, Conn., where his family had a puppet theater. “We used to do a crazy new modern version of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ called ‘Hamilton and Geraldine,’ ” he recalls. “It was one of our big hits. They were in a camping trailer, and it was very silly.”

A decade or so later, Fitch graduated from Harvard with a major in visual and environmental studies. He stayed on as a visual arts tutor, which is when he met Gilbert, who was a music student.

Fitch was mulling the idea of professional training, but not in music or theater.

“I was thinking I was going to be an architect,” he recalls. “But I kept not going to architecture school, and instead I started getting jobs to design really interesting homes. I got hired as an architectural designer, which is what it’s called if you don’t have a license.”

Fitch designed homes for musicians, including Gilbert and violinist Joshua Bell. One designing job he sees as another precursor of “Hansel and Gretel” was “a forest glen for this billionaire in Wisconsin, an interior forest that was his home movie theater.”

“It’s a very idyllic little forest with trees, and a sky changes, and there are all these sheep in the forest,” he continues. “There are these very luxurious reclining shrubs. And in between are the sheep, and you can slant the heads of the sheep out and put your drink in their little pink Formica throats.”

Such design projects were inherently theatrical.

“Puppets were about building little worlds, and so are the interiors,” says Fitch. “And theater is that in a different way. You are making a world, a parallel universe for people to walk around inside of, a mindscape to try out for a night.”

Another “Hansel and Gretel” precursor was Fitch’s work as a visual artist. Ten years ago, he began collaborating with artist Mimi Oka on a group of artworks he calls Orphic -- working with food as art. Their Orphic Feasts were edible art.

“His installation art had to do with food, and he was trafficking in an idiom that was whimsical,” says Koelsch. “And ‘Hansel and Gretel’ is basically about food.”

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A manager’s tip

THE path by which Fitch came to L.A. Opera’s attention is not unusual in the opera world, where artists’ managers typically wield a great deal of influence.

The company was first interested in Gilbert, 39, chief conductor and advisor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra since 2000 and, since 2003, the first music director of Santa Fe Opera.

“We started with Alan and had originally conceived of using other directors,” says Koelsch. “Their mutual manager mentioned we should look at Fitch’s stuff.”

In fact, Gilbert was the person who persuaded Fitch to try his hand at opera. The two collaborated on “The Soldier’s Tale” at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival as well as on “Das Rheingold” in Stockholm. In July at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Mass., Fitch staged the American premiere of Elliott Carter’s “What’s Next?”

Still, Fitch’s first and thus far only fully staged opera was “Turandot” last summer at Santa Fe Opera. Major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, did not review it. But in any case, “Hansel and Gretel” was well under way by then.

From the first phone call about “Hansel and Gretel,” Fitch had thought he’d take his visual inspiration from two previous works. “When I was on the phone listening to this as an idea, I was staring at a picture I had made. It’s called ‘Bleeding Painting,’ and it’s a paint-by-number painting with a little boy walking through a forest. And I cut a big wound in the painting, like a Christ wound, and there’s one perfect drop of blood coming out of this wound. I thought, ‘That is so much the feeling that I’m hoping for.’ ”

The other image that popped into his head was a sculpture.

“The sculpture was a dreamscape, a series of translucent fiberglass shapes. In some ways, it looks like the inside of a person’s head, looking out.

“I just married those two works, and that’s what the storytelling ended up being all about -- where you create an expectation visually, and then you break it,” says Fitch. “The audience comes into this big huge painting. It looks like everybody’s image of Hansel and Gretel’s cottage and everybody’s image of the Black Forest. And it starts to break down and turns into something else entirely. It’s about breaking expectations and seeing the story more from the mind’s eye of the characters.”

However, it’s the creatures and not the stars that get the really memorable looks.

“One of the exciting things about creating ‘Hansel and Gretel’ is that so many of the characters are not bound by any period or traditional restrictions,” says costume director Green. “The Dew Fairy and the Sandman and all the animals can only be limited by one’s imagination.”

Reminiscent of the work of Maurice Sendak and Julie Taymor, among others, the animal-like creatures Fitch has invented weren’t originally in the opera.

“In the opera, those are angels, but I didn’t want to create angels that we recognize with wings and robes,” he says. “I just started thinking more about an animist world, so I actually went and found this Eskimo tradition of the Yupik people of the Northwest Territories.” He used that as inspiration.

The effect may be dramatic, but it hasn’t been easy to create. The costuming challenges lie not only in the scarcity of time with Fitch -- because he is both designing and directing -- but in the scale, novelty and technical requirements.

“The biggest challenge has been in the engineering of the animal costumes, making them to not only represent Doug’s vision but wearable, workable costumes that have ventilation, balanced weight and easy access for repairs and battery changes,” explains Green.

Yet creating the unimaginable, though just one part of Fitch’s vision, is essential to his belief in the power of the metaphorest, the place where change takes place.

“Theater for me is about transformations, of the visual and of people,” he says. “It’s all about the alchemy of transformation, and there’s no reason to go see a piece of theater if you’re not there for some kind of shift or transformation.”

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‘Hansel and Gretel’

Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 2 p.m. next Sunday, Nov. 26 and Dec. 9 and 17; 7:30 p.m. Nov. 29 and Dec. 2, 6 and 14

Price: $30 to $220

Contact: (213) 972-8001 or www.laopera.com