Photo © Ken Howard for the Metropolitan Opera

We started off 2008 with a performance of Hansel and Gretel, live in HD from the Met. There are three theaters showing these broadcasts in Austin. Last time (Romeo and Juliet) we went to the Regal Met Stadium on Little Texas Lane. It was good but we wanted to try another one too. Strangely, there is one about two miles further south on I-35: Cinemark at South Park Meadows. This is a newer theater but newer does not always mean better and it wasn’t.

There were only about twenty people in attendance. The video quality was poor and very dark – certainly not up to HD standard. In addition, the sound level was very low. After about twenty minutes I went in search of the manager. He said he couldn’t do anything about the video quality but agreed to raise the volume, and he did. But about ten minutes later the feed was lost. We sat for another ten minutes then went to the box office and got a refund. We then drove to the Regal Met Stadium. We knew we would miss part of the live broadcast but we wanted to take the opportunity to have a direct comparison with the quality (sic) in the Cinemark.

When we arrived Act I was still in progress – we came in during the Children’s Prayer – and it was obvious that both the video and audio quality were much better than the Cinemark. We hadn’t anticipated having a problem getting seats. For the Romeo broadcast at this theater there were two hundred people in a five hundred seat theater. But this time they have moved the broadcast to a smaller theater. I would guess it seated about two hundred. In fact, almost every seat was taken. We squeezed into the end of the second row. We will have to come earlier next time if we want to get good seats.

So we determined that the Regal Met Stadium is far superior as a place to watch these broadcasts. But we also determined that this new production of Hansel and Gretel was hardly worth the effort. In fact, it was a disgrace. This was the worst production of the opera I have ever seen. The producer was Richard Jones and he obviously set out to give us a Freudian urban slum view of the opera.

Gone was all the fairy tale romanticism built into the words and music. The children were not lost in the forest. In fact, they never went near a forest or even a single tree. For their prayer they lay down on the floor of their house. There were no angels in their dream, only grotesque bakers laying on heaping tables of food. They didn’t awake to the sounds of birds and the magic of a Dew Fairy, nor did they ever see a gingerbread house. Instead, we had Philip Langridge dressed as a witch and making obscene gestures with his broomstick between his legs. When the children triumphed over the witch Gretel painted a Hitlerian mustache on Hansel.  And on it went.

The opening scene was set in a tiny drab room in the children’s house. There was no light or color to be seen anywhere. Their father came home drunk and their mother appeared popping pills. This was Wozzeck not Hansel and Gretel. Humperdinck’s opera is a full-blown romantic realization of one of the most beloved of the Grimms’ fairy tales. To bring us this perverted realization Jones had to ignore both the words and the music. And he did. A travesty. Christine Schäfer as Gretel and Philip Langridge were both excellent. Vladimir Jurowski conducted and looked handsome and graceful in the pit. He made no particular impression as an interpreter.

The best part of the experience was meeting the people sitting next to us at the Regal Met Stadium: Mark and Janet. They have rented an apartment in Austin for the winter to spend time with their daughter and her family. Their home base is Harrisburg, PA. Mark was a lawyer and Janet a school art teacher and administrator. They met in the Dominican Republic of all places where they were both in the Peace Corps in the 1960s.

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