Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 6 - Hansel and Gretel

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 34 How would you define original director Richard Jones’s vision for this piece? It’s a meditation on both the lack and the overabundance of food, and how people handle both of those situations. It’s certainly a dark telling of the story and very much in line with the Grimm Brothers. It has their same undercurrent of darkness, which has lightened a bit in the time since the story was written. Richard deals with the narrative as reality, rather than as a fairytale—but the production still does take us to the psychological root of the fairy tale, on a dark journey through the woods and out again. Eric Einhorn talks about bringing hunger and temptation to life on stage by Roger Pines The stage definitely recalls England post World War II, doesn’t it? Yes, it certainly evokes that time of deprivation. But it’s presented by Richard and the designer, John Macfarlane, in a non-literal way, making it easily identifiable and immediate for audiences. A universal visual world. Hunger really is the operative idea here. And the opening scene is so much about that. The two children, alone and hungry, are seen in crisis. It’s the umpteenth day that they’ve been left with little or nothing to eat, and that really kicks off everything. It drives these kids to the events of the opera. The adult singers playing the children move more convincingly than in any other version I’ve seen. Richard was adamant about creating very specific physical characterizations of the kids. It’s a late child/ early adolescent movement, with that awkwardness and self-discovery. Because of their hunger and also because of certain distinct character traits, the kids behave in particular ways. In Richard’s concept, Hansel is a very obsessive child, with repetitive gestures and actions with props and doors in the first scene. The character is rooted in this physicality and carries it through the show. What about Gretel? She’s a pre-adolescent witch. During rehearsals for the Met revival, Richard spoke quite a bit about Gretel having powers that she doesn’t know what to do with yet. When she finds herself in the Witch’s kitchen and witnesses the spells, she immediately takes to them. In this production, the Witch is defeated in a power shift; she’s leaving the world, but in her place is Gretel. It’s a bit Lord of the Flies —you give children power and what happens? Are we innately good or innately bad? It’s a subtle point, but like so much of what Richard does in this production, it gives the performer a real anchor. Can we talk about the different images of plates, which are so important? The theme of the show being hunger, there are repetitive images of plates on painted drops: full, empty, broken, and bloody. Their primary task is to mask scene changes, but they’re also a way to track the hunger narrative. Simon Pauly Director’s note