Oberlin

The idea for the opera Hansel und Gretel was proposed to Humperdinck by his sister, who approached him about writing music for songs that she had written for her children for Christmas based on the story. Her musical sketches and the songs were turned into a full-scale opera with a bit of Humperdinck's tinkering. While no masterpiece, it's still loved as a heartwarming Christmas favorite.

Staged in most of its traditional glory on Friday November 8, 2013, at Oberlin's Hall Auditorium, Hansel und Gretel was Oberlin Opera Theater's most recent mounting. But their intrepid director Jonathon Field put a damper on the holiday cheer, instead picking up on the theme of negligence beneath its surface and giving it a rather dark treatment. Though period garb was worn, Gretel was played by a soprano and Hansel a mezzo, little kids actually played the little choristers, and the witch was incredibly devious, it wasn't all fun and games in those enchanted forests.

Hansel and Gretel spend most of the story lost in the forest when their mother orders them to pick strawberries for the family. After a series of trials and tribulations out in the open, they are reunited with their mother and father, and the chorus wails, "When all hope is gone/God reaches out His helping hand." In the context of Field's vision, this line did less to warm our hearts than to break them - how could the victorious Hansel and Gretel, who defeated the evil witch, return to their belligerent and absent-minded parents, who left them all alone in the first place?

Aggression was a key theme of Field's rendition. In the opening scene with just Hansel and Gretel, they took turns hitting each other on the head or pulling each other by the hair and ear. "Kopp kopp kopp!" they chirped in half-sung, half-spoken jabs. Other times they soared, they snarled, they begged. Soprano Emily Hopkins'15 (Gretel) sang with a penetrating tone that carried naturally over the full pit orchestra, and mezzo-soprano Nicole Levesque '14 (Hansel), sang with a similarly youthful vivacity, while also providing a brazen, boyish contrast to the demure Gretel.

Hannah Hagerty '15 (Mutter) had an appropriately authoritative and deep mezzo bellow, although Michael Davis '15 (Vater) could have let his beautiful baritone voice, as well as his whole physicality, fall under the influence of alcohol a little more. Field seemed to suggest that the parents were not outstanding people, so a bit of sliminess would have probably been obliged.

This is a perennial problem in Opera Theater: how do singers communicate just as effectively with their whole body when they have spent years and years localizing the rather codified physical technique of singing? While the leads all had outstanding vocal palettes that communicated effortlessly, their acting felt forced and repetitive. Most of the cast's theatrical limitations fragmented the emotional arc of the scenes.

That said, the plot ways always as clear as day. Nuanced acting isn't the biggest deal as long as we are dazzled in one way or another. Sure, we go to the opera for a theatrical experience, but in the end can we really expect Broadway? The singers can't afford to indulge in nuanced moment-to-moment communication with each other when firmly fastened to the conductor's baton, anyway.

Raphael Jiménez, director of orchestras at Oberlin Conservatory, did a fantastic job of managing the singers together with the pit, doling out extra heavy cues only a couple times for the singers who had lost their place. Hansel und Gretel, scored for a large orchestra, was arranged in a lopsided formation, but Jimenez' level of clarity helped lift them out of several awkward shuffles.

In general, the players brought keen musicality to Humperdinck's orchestration. The expansive overture was warm and touching, and when the angels of the night came out to protect the sleeping children at the end of the first act, the violins shimmered like moonlight.

Visually, Field gave us a lot on which to feast our eyes. A backdrop of a giant sun pulsed behind the angels. In Act II, we met the highlight of the show, our witch, played by alumna Karen Jesse '02, whose face was caked in exaggerated black-and-white make-up reminiscent of Jigsaw from the horrifying Saw movies. Her dynamic control was exquisite, and her mastery of the witch's merry pretense was perfectly nauseating. In the witch's realm, huge candies decked the exterior of her house, and her dress was a puffy, gaudy collage of loud colors and patterns.

Hansel and Gretel made sure she was dead, first by the traditional head-into-oven but then beheading her, leaving the audience gasping. Jesse was unaffected: a plastic head rolled across center-stage. The creativity and trickery of this stunt is another sign of Field and his crew's high level of artistry pervading the show. Hats off to set designer Chris McCollum, lighting designer Jeremy Benjamin, and costume designer Chris Flaherty.

If Jesse is an example of the kind of singer an Obie could be in five to ten years, the music world should take note. She sets the bar high for budding artists like Hopkins and Levesque, who never sounded out of place alongside her. As we keep our eyes peeled to see where the stars of today's Oberlin Opera Theater go, they'll probably have a lot of options. Their talents aside, the influence of Field's imaginative complexity that breathes life into classics will serve them well within classical music's rapidly changing terrain.