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Music
Engelbert
Humperdinck
Conductor
Alexander
Polianichko
Director
Richard Jones
Revival
Director
Annilese
Miskimmon
Designer
John Macfarlane
Lighting
Designer
Jennifer Tipton
Hansel
Imelda Drumm
Gretel
Linda Kitchen
Mother
Anne-Marie Owens
Father
David Kempster
Witch
Peter Hoare
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Sadler's
Wells
Welsh National Opera
11 March
2004 |
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This revival
of Richard Jones 1999 production is
a gory tour through three fabulous kitchen
scenes, almost humorous and magical
enough to disguise the bland score of
Humperdinck's first opera. From the
outset Imelda Drumm (singing with beautiful
clarity and force) and Linda Kitchen
convincingly inhabit their sibling relationship
combining fighting and affection, against
a wonderfully monochrome backdrop of
domestic depression. The kitchen sink
setting is the grey home for an obese
pill-popping mother and drunken father
whose children trill over the drama
of spilt milk and other terrifying mundanities.
Grey
gives way to the oozing red of spilt
berries and blood, and starving deprivation
gives way to sickening gluttony, in
the surreal dream sequence in which
Pillsbury doughboys serve the sleeping
children a banquet in the woods, accompanied
by Jones signature puppetry. Act 3 is
a gastronomic version of Shockheaded
Peter enacted
in the nightmarish kitchen of the witch,
a cannibal sung powerfully by Peter
Hoare in pantomime baggy tights and
granny shoes who forces Gretel to force-feed
her brother through a funnel and wraps
him up like a chicken leg before meeting
an appropriately sticky end.
Although
in the end this imaginative staging
could not compensate for the uninteresting
music played rather half-heartedly by
the WNO orchestra, all parts (in particular
Imelda Drumm) sang the libretto beautifully,
stuffed with such challenging lines
as "come now Gretel dear, youll fit
the fish kettle here"
Maya Lester
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