Subject: Hansel and Gretel, Palace Opera, QEH 30Jan97

Gretel       Jaqueline Varsey
Hansel       Joanne Edworthy
Mother       Jenny Miller
Father       Charles Johnson
Sandman/Dew fairy
             Jenny Saunders
Witch        Anya Kubrick

Terpsichore Arts Company
London Concertante

Conductor    Jonathan Finney
Director     Daniel Farncombe
Production designer
             Christiane Kubrick

After the echt deutsch production a couple of weeks ago, I found Palace
Opera's a bit of a witch's breakfast. There was some fine singing,
especially from Jaqueline Varsey and Joanne Edworthy, and the small
orchestra made the music sound truly dramatic, with the most Wagnerian
witch hunt I've ever heard.

But the production itself was all over the place. The translation (by
Anthony Scales) tried to include all the obnoxiousness of the children in
the words, in contemporary idiom, and managed to be completely
incomprehensible most of the time because the words were so badly matched
to the notes. It wasn't, for the most part, the singers' fault -- when I
could hear the sounds clearly I still had to think about what the words
were.

The father was a complete slob and bully. The children remembered the
prayer from "when he's trying to be nice to us". He attacked the mother
with a pick handle at one point. (Oddly enough, Charles Johnson's singing
sounded very gentlemanly and controlled, after an off-pitch off-stage
start.) And in the first act, the set seemed to be aiming for a kind of
verismo as well. It consisted of flats, one in front for the house, removed
for the second scene to show the forest, about seven feet high and painted
in small detail. But messy looking. The witch's house was also flat (which
in my book just won't do) and was somewhere between Klimt and a seventies
children's book. Christiane Kubrick, the set designer, works mainly as a
painter.

The angels were also flat, though eight dancers dressed like crib figures
did a bit of swooshing around to the angel music (which was far more
agitated than usual, but I thought very effectively played).

The other main element of the decor was nasty children's books of today,
and this really hit the spot with its target audience. During the witch
hunt music, little divils leapt about the stage and eventually moved the
furniture; there were plastic sub-Bosch monsters around the witch's house
and dancing in the woods as it got dark; and the witch was a larger version
of Witchie Poo (sp.? I never watched it, honest) with a purple tail.
Strangely, the translation lost all references to the devil, as well as to
providence.

If I didn't know it backwards, I don't think I would have had a clue what
was going on. Still, Palace Opera is a small, newish company on a smallish
budget, and they certainly tried. The children in the audience seemed to
love it, and you can't beat that gingerbread music.