Hansel and Gretel by Humperdinck, Od (2022/2022), Režija: Axel Ranisch, Dirigent Alevtina Ioffe, Christopher Schumann, Opernhaus, Stuttgart, Germany

Even in fairy tales, the world sometimes looks as if it is going to the dogs: In the Besenbinder household, where the siblings Hansel and Gretel are growing up, there is seldom more to bite than dry bread. And outside you only find something to eat quite deep in the dark forest, because the immediate domestic environment throws nothing. But what do you want to do with such a broken world? Luckily there is a certain Knusperhexe who, as the charity queen, solves the supply problem for director Axel Ranisch and distributes delicious, colorful drops. The catch: In this Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Gone Wrong fantasy, Hansel and Gretel discover that the candy is made from rather unusual ingredients. When the crispy witch is finally in the oven where Hansel was supposed to be roasting, But we wouldn't be in the fairy tale if at the end of the day a hope didn't grow from somewhere. Engelbert Humperdinck and his sister Adelheid Wette originally only wanted to perform a little fairy tale play for Christmas, but the project's escalation logic, which then began with great enthusiasm, brought us one of the most popular large-format family plays in music theater history. Therefore, the ideal cast: With the conductor Alevtina Ioffe, Axel Ranisch, who landed a real audience hit for the Staatsoper Stuttgart with Die Liebe zu Drei Orangen in 2018, has already hatched the daring double evening Iolanta / Mavraat the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. He takes Humperdinck's fairy tale opera again with a lot of love of storytelling and crude humor and casually asks what kind of transformations the world still has to go through before we know what the good life could look like.