Evaluation – Gloriously ‘Grimm’ Christmas productions at Covent Garden

Fairy tales by the brothers Grimm encourage massively fulfilling Christmas productions at each Covent Garden theatres, and there’s nothing grim about them, aside from the same old grisly ends of the wolf in Red Riding Hood and the cannibalistic witch in Hansel and Gretel.

Wolf, Witch, Giant, Fairy, on the Linbury Theatre, downstairs from the Opera House, is a deliciously uninhibited re-working of the Red Riding Hood story, souping up the plot by incorporating components of different fairy tales together with Jack and the Beanstalk, with a depraved witch, a very good fairy and a speaking cat thrown in for good measure.

As a really appreciative viewers confirmed, the Little Bulb Theatre firm who put this manufacturing collectively have brilliantly created one thing that appeals to kids as younger as three or 4, whereas additionally being appreciated by their mother and father and grandparents. All the forged play a formidable number of devices on stage, with the music primarily based on a re-working of many European people songs. With neither the crass innueudos of pantomime nor the sober musical aspirations of opera, it’s the excellent Christmas household leisure. It solely lasts simply over an hour, however it’s full of motion, enjoyable and surprises. Like any self-respecting opera, nonetheless, it’s sung all through, aside from the a part of the narrator (Peter Brathwaite) who helps transfer the story alongside.

The costumes, particularly the superbly constructed animal heads worn by a number of of the forged, are placing, whereas the singing, significantly that of Clare Beresford as Red Riding Hood, is of a really excessive customary.

Meanwhile, the Opera House upstairs has settled right into a run of Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. No, not that Engelbert Humperdinck – this one was a German composer who wrote this opera within the Eighteen Nineties, lengthy earlier than a British pop singer borrowed his title.

This is a revival of Antony McDonald’s 2018 manufacturing however this time, unusually for the ROH, it’s improved by being carried out in English in a superb new translation by Kelley Rourke. The violence within the plot as the kids fall into the arms of the child-eating witch make it appropriate for older kids than the occasion on the Linbury – the ROH advises in opposition to bringing anybody youthful than eight – and singing in English is way extra child-friendly than the unique German.

The set makes its personal contribution to the violence with the design of the witch’s home primarily based on the house of Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s movie Psycho, however with the ugly addition of a big knife sticking via the roof. This can also be a refined reference to an essay by the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim by which a psychoanalytic interpretation of Hansel and Gretel performs an necessary half.

Back on stage, the title roles are excellently performed by Anglo-French mezzo-soprano Anna Stéphany (Hansel) and Irish soprano Anna Devin (Gretel) who painting very effectively the connection between the siblings because it veers between love and bickering. With Mark Wigglesworth conducting the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in a meticulously jolly account of Humperdinck’s cheerful music, all of it provides as much as a completely fulfilling efficiency.

For many kids of music-loving mother and father, Hansel and Gretel will likely be their introduction to the glories opera has to supply. As a bit of great enjoyable, it may hardly be bettered.