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Episode Transcript - Demon Barbers and Human Ovens (1/07/08)

For the extended holiday season, Peter Gelb and Tim Burton have chosen to offer us family fare: two shows that include live women being baked alive in ovens, perceived through the glass doors of the oven screaming and disintegrating, and then being turned into grisly meat pies. Now, the phrase "grisly meat pies" does not come from Stephen Sondheim's Grand Guignol musical "Sweeney Todd" which Tim Burton has turned into a movie (there they're the best pies in london) but from of all places the sweet and angelic "Hansel and Gretel," the opera by Engelbert Humperdinck at the MET.

Both of these settings are considerably bloodier than the originals, at least one might think. It seems to me that despite Stephen Sondheim's involvement and endorsement of the Burton film that the "Sweeney Todd" movie is the more extreme statement of the original than the Richard Jones production. Both of these musical theater works offer an interesting, uneasy maybe, or fascinating balance between tragedy and comedy. In "Sweeney Todd" there are all kinds of comic elements but the underlying subtext of a guy who slits people's throats and turns them into meat pies.

In "Hansel and Gretel," it's all angels on a ladder and so forth, but there's still a witch who eats children for gosh sakes, and there's a lot of starvation stuff in the first act as the poor people are struggling to deal with their poverty. Now Burton has chosen to bathe everything in gore. The blood splatters everywhere, some of the comic or distancing elements like "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" have been removed, and I know people (like my wife) who are just repelled by the thing.

On the other hand, it's very, very powerful and the performances are terrific and the atmosphere of glooming, brooding London is pretty wonderful too. The "Hansel and Gretel" production at the Met is a well traveled one. I chose to see it in a DVD format as a better comparison with the film of "Sweeney Todd." It's a remarkable production and one of the things that makes it remarkable is the gorgeous and disturbing sets and costumes by John Macfarlane. Now it's easy to dismiss this thing as a kind of euro-trash perversion of modernism in the service of anger desweetening everything, where there's a horrible grimness to things.

You could protest the mid 20th century setting. You could protest the dream pantomime being turned into a kind of fantasy banquet with chefs serving the children, but for me it all worked. But there were problems at the Met. The set is too small for the stage. Jennifer Tipton's always wonderful lighting is sort of obliterated by the closeups and the glaringness of the telecast. In fact, the closeups are just relentless which in turn diffuse the mystery and distance of the whole stage picture. I mean, you don't wanna demystify opera with a million shots of backstage chat, it's more about the Met than the opera. Opera at its best is a mystery. Also Peter Gelb's fascination with acting is undercut even when you have good actors like Alice Coote and Christine Schäfer. Closeups don't do them any favors.

And yet, and yet the music is just gorgeous. Engelbert Humperdinck was a disciple of Wagner, and it's Wagnerian in the most wonderful way. The grimness is really true to the original Brothers Grimm fairytale and even to the words that Adelheid Wette, his sister, had crafted for the sweetened version of the opera. I know it's a grim opera because it was the first opera that I ever saw when I was 6 or 7 years old in Frankfurt, Germany, and when the witch came on I was so scared that i crawled under my seat.

"Hansel and Gretel" is a grim opera and yet it's true and the musical performance at the Met is just terrific. Right down the line, all the singers and Vladimir Jurowski conducting. I would still say you want to see the Richard Jones production at the Met, not in the movie theater, and maybe you want to see "Sweeney Todd" on the stage as well.

This is John Rockwell for Rockwell Matters.

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