Kicking Off a Grimm Holiday Season

City has jumpstarted the holiday season with a revival of one of their finest, James Robinson's imaginative and high-concept 1998 production of Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel.

Though a well-known figure in his day, Engelbert Humperdinck's reputation today rests squarely on "Hansel and Gretel." The composer's slavish devotion to Wagner inspired him to surrender his own powers of innovation (if indeed he had any) in order to write music like the composer of the "Ring." Indeed, Humperdinck's on the record as saying "I'd gladly give up 'originality' to be able to write choruses like the ones in Parsifal." With "Hansel and Gretel" - by far the best known of Humperdinck's eight operas - he comes pretty damn close in mastering Wagner's lush, brassy orchestrations and leitmotivic technique. In a sense, Humperdinck can be credited for an even greater coup than his mentor by writing a work whose appeal extends far beyond the potential audience for "Meistersinger."

City's somewhat weathered production is a classic in every sense of the word: effective, elegant and original. The production (and English-language performing translation) transposes the action from the Brothers Grimm original to late 19th century Manhattan, where Hansel and Gretel live in a tenement with their German immigrant parents. They make their way uptown in search of dinner and wind up, lost and exhausted in Central Park. The witch is in fact a high society lady, and her pastry mansion - you guessed it - is a mansion on the Upper East Side.

They've assembled a fine cast to boot, singing the clever and metrically accurate translation of Cori Ellison. The Ellison translation retains the German original of the folk songs, while providing compelling and amusingly updated and place-specific dialogue for the siblings as they wander around the city at night looking for supper.

The show's brightest star was undoubtedly the soprano Jennifer Aylmer, who brought gusto and soft, subdued shading to the alternately timid and audacious Gretel. She was very much at home in her character's middle range, never sounding muddled, dull or plain tired. Jennifer Rivera, a brusque mezzo, exaggerated Hansel's tomboyish swagger and spunk, but she turned out a solid performance that showcased her sensuous and lulling voice, most noticeably in the bedtime prayer that ends act one. The "adults" were somewhat less consistent. The baritone Michael Chioldi boomed out the Father's joyous (and possibly drunken) song with a fullness that had hitherto been lacking. But he often sacrificed accuracy for power. The Mother, sang by Cheryl Evans, was more controlled and suitably forlorn in her small role. And as the wicked child-eating witch, Jessie Raven was positively lurid. Appearing late in the performance, she sang the show-stopping role with maniacally voluptuous tones. They was no denying that she possessed the seductive cackle and evil glimmer to bring her mosterous character to life.

In the pit, Steven Mosteller led a spirited and full-bodied performance that could overpower some of the softer voiced (Aylmer's included). But with music as deliriously grand and warmly reverent as this, it scarcely mattered.