A taste for gingerbread

Maurice Sendak is working on a film version of

with Spike Jonze, not Spike Lee, as was stated in an earlier version.

For an opera that has everything - an unrelentingly beautiful score, tremendous visual possibilities and an alluring story with as much modern-day social commentary as you want to read into it -

Hänsel und Gretel

has managed to stay away from Philadelphia for a long time.

It was once standard repertoire here, yet curiously, for an opera so accessible to beginners, Hänsel und Gretel has not had a professional staging locally in more than four decades.

But tomorrow night, after a long slumber, the Brothers Grimm story (with major softening) set to music by a Wagner acolyte will come to life at the Academy of Music in Maurice Sendak's pleasantly spooky production.

This Sendak version marks the first time the Opera Company of Philadelphia has performed the work, by German composer Engelbert Humperdinck. It's a production premiered a decade ago by the Houston Grand Opera, and Sendak says that, at the time, he wasn't at all sure he wanted to add Hänsel und Gretel to his list of opera credits.

"I love opera and I have done any number of operas. But I kind of stayed away from it because it seemed such a predictable opera for a children's-book writer and illustrator. Too predictable," said Sendak, 79, in a recent phone interview. "I wanted to do it because it was time. But I didn't want to see it reduced to a kiddie opera, which is too often what happens to it."

That question - whether Hänsel und Gretel is for children or adults - confounds many listeners, especially in a perceived repertoire hierarchy that often has aficionados and newbies looking suspiciously at each other.

Even the Opera Company is sending slightly mixed signals. The opera will be performed in German with English supertitles, which probably will leave behind some children. On the other hand, the company is offering a discounted ticket to anyone under 17 joining an adult.

The production Sendak created with director Frank Corsaro - which has been slightly reimagined in Philadelphia by director Dorothy Danner - he hopes avoids becoming too icing-sweet, which is the coating the opera has often acquired, with its inevitable Christmas time slot.

(A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve day, New York's Metropolitan Opera performs a production new to it, led by Vladimir Jurowski, which will be repeated and broadcast live Jan. 1 to hundreds of movie theaters nationally, including seven in the Philadelphia area.)

Such bracing treatment might take its cue from the music, which is alternately bright and menacing, and wall-to-wall tuneful and lush. Some of the musical material is lifted from folk tunes; some just sounds like it. The score shows glints of Wagner and perhaps the lightest Richard Strauss.

But in fact, the story - which more or less spins out from the line "Just a minute, where are the children?" sung by the children's inebriated father - is quite dark.

"It's terrifying how [Hänsel and Gretel] need each other, the wit and wisdom of having to get out of trouble, how they forgive the worse damage - they forgive their father. It's about the heart-stopping simplicity and goodwill and lovingness of children," says Sendak.

At rehearsal Saturday in the Academy of Music, Sendak's vision was taking its elaborate storybook shape. More than 30 pieces of painted drop scenery are moved in and out, giving the production an always-transforming feeling. A forest of blues and greens is friendly enough, but teeth-baring creatures look in from the sides. A large golden moon rises at one point. The witch's gingerbread house is made of the traditional sweets, with pretzel cladding and peppermint-stick downspouts.

The style could be no one but Sendak - only about a thousand times larger than the tiny volumes in the Nutshell Library that first brought the author's name before millions of children.

There's humor, too. The Dew Fairy comes with pigtails stiffly turned up, and she holds a mop like a Carol Burnett creation. One of the cages meant to confine a child is so heavily fruited it could have dropped from Carmen Miranda's head.

Sendak says that he was basically aiming for German sets and costumes of a century or so ago, but that Humperdinck's music was the only other specific inspiration.

"There's not much literal thought that goes into these things," he said. "You have a passion for the score, and I never did an opera when I did not feel powerfully drawn to the music - there's no point to doing it. It comes by intuition. That's the way it works. I'll try out an illustration. You get a feeling and you search out the feeling with the pencil until it's like the feeling you're having. Other people either get the feeling or they don't."

Sendak - who these days is working with Spike Jonze on a live-action movie version of Where the Wild Things Are - says he doesn't expect he'll ever do another opera.

"Now I am 79 years old, I'll be 80 in six months, and there are a number of books I so much want to get done, so I can't do everything else. Opera means traveling and a huge investment of time. When I was in my 50s doing it I had a wonderful time, and it's painful not to do it."

Knowing that his opera days are over makes him hope to travel to Philadelphia from his Connecticut home to see his Hänsel und Gretel.

"I am going to try to. I have a particular affection for this production, and I don't know if I'll ever see it again. I am not in great health and the trip will be hard. I don't want the woodsprites to find me dead in the second act of the opera. It would make a great headline, but it's not the way I want to go. The kids would love it."

Then, in mock boy-soprano tones, he says something one could easily imagine as the caption to a Sendak illustration:

" 'Look, Mommy, Mr. Sendak's dead!' "

To watch video and read Peter Dobrin's 2005 appeal for a local production, go to http://go.philly.com/hanselandgretel