Playwright: The ensemble after the Brothers Grimm and the 1893 Humperdinck opera. At: The Building Stage, 412 N. Carpenter St. Tickets: 312-491-1369; www.buildingstage.com; $22. Runs through: April 22
As fairy tales go, Hansel and Gretel is definitely one of the darker ones since it features starvation, abandonment, cannibalism and killing (pushing a witch into an oven). So it's understandable why The Building Stage would mention in a press release that its new production of Hansel und Gretel is targeted more at adults rather than kids.
Yet, The Building Stage's artistic forces under director/set designer Blake Montgomery don't quite seem to know what they really want to say with Hansel und Gretel. Thanks to the actors' exaggerated German accents (very akin to those chubby Bavarian kids in Bugs Bunny's 1954 cartoon encounter with Witch Hazel), this Hänsel und Gretel comes off as an odd mix of a silly send-up in addition to being a somber look at neglectful parenting and a sadistic witch's manipulative mind games that border on torture. Kids may squirm due to the 90-minute running time with no intermission, but there really isn't anything that would compel you to shield the innocent eyes of young children.
The Building Stage's Hänsel und Gretel starts out with the much more sanitized approach from the 1893 opera by composer Engelbert Humperdinck and his librettist-sister Adelheid Wette. The show then shifts into the earlier and harsher Grimm Brothers version of the story.
Yet the transition isn't so seamless, and it cries out for more postmodern contextualizing rather than just the kids questioning their father's shifting profession from a broom merchant to an experienced woodcutter.
Like the opera, two women portray the plucky title brother and sister, and Chelsea Keenan and Pamela Maurer respectively have a fun time at playing Hansel and Gretel. Jenny Lamb is also a dynamic force as the aggravated stepmother who also doubles as the sadistic witch. Ian Knox is fine as the father, although one would want more internal conflict as he is morally torn about abandoning his children in the forest.
On the production side of things, everything is mostly simple and sometimes cartoonish, especially in the candy-colored costumes of Mieka van der Ploeg and the changing painted backdrops that variously depict an empty cupboard, the parents' bedroom and the flames of the oversize oven.
Oddly, Matthew Muniz's scoring doesn't borrow from Humperdinck's score for his live piano accompaniment, even though the opera is in the public domain. The stylistic switch from Humperdinck's melody-filled opera to Muniz's own atmospheric underscoring of dread might have helped when things turned darker in the production's storytelling approach. However, like so many questionable decisions made in The Building Stage's Hänsel und Gretel, it feels like yet another missed opportunity for the production.