Royal Opera House, London
When it was first seen two years ago, Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier's production of Humperdinck's masterpiece was the Royal Opera's Christmas show, although the initial response was that the tone was not exactly Christmassy.
But it's been brought back again at the same time of year, revived by Elaine Kidd ? and with three matinees among the run of performances, it is clearly being aimed at a family audience, although parents should think very carefully before they take their children along.
As a first opera for the uninitiated, it fails on almost every level. Wit is in very short supply, and charm non-existent, for in their efforts to ensure that the only sugar on show in this Hansel und Gretel is that in the marzipan house through which the Witch lures the children, Leiser and Caurier have come up with something that is, by turns, drab, dull and, in the final act, distinctly questionable.
The only images that would persist, I suspect, are the more horrifying ones, of the children's corpses hanging in the witch's cold store, ready to be loaded into her scarily hi-tech ovens, and neither the inevitable happily-ever-after ending, nor anything that comes earlier, is likely to expunge memories of the horrors.
What we have then, is a distinctly adult take on this fairytale opera, but one which takes a while to focus even that. The first act is desperately uninvolving, the action unnecessarily confined by the geometry of Christian Fenoiullat's set, and even the wonderful dream pantomime at the end of the second, one of the great setpieces in all opera, fails to work its magic here, with the Sandman got up as something out of a David Lynch movie and the angels with squirrels' heads (a cut-price seven of them rather than the prescribed 14) making no real sense at all.
The fault wasn't all the production's, because Rory MacDonald's conducting didn't really get into its stride until the third act, by which time most of the greatest musical moments had been and gone. The performances onstage were much more convincing, with Christine Rice a wonderfully commanding Hansel, Ailish Tynan an increasingly effective presence as Gretel, Thomas Allen and Yvonne Howard accomplished hands as the parents, and Jane Henschel a gruesomely predatory Witch.
All would have communicated far better had the opera been sung in English ? in a show at least partly aimed at introducing children to opera, having an Anglophone cast singing in German to an English-speaking audience seems the most ridiculous musical snobbery.
In rep until 7 January. Box office: 020 7304 4000
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