ACT I: The broom-maker’s house.
Hansel and Gretel are supposed to be doing their chores at home. When their mother returns to find them goofing off and romping around, she, in her fury, spills the milk that was all she had for dinner. She then chases the children out into the forest to pick strawberries.
Their father, a broom-maker, returns home drunk, celebrating that he has sold all of his brooms at market and so has bought food. He is horrified to discover that his children are in the woods because a child-eating Witch lives there. They rush into the forest to look for their children.

ACT II: In the woods.
When evening falls, Gretel becomes frightened and Hansel admits that he has lost the way. The children hear and see strange things in the gloom, becoming more and more terrified. The Sandman comes and brings them sleep. Fourteen angels guard them as they begin to dream.

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ACT III: The Witch’s house.
The next morning, the Dew Fairy gently stirs the sleeping children. The children discover a house made of sugary confections and they cautiously begin to eat small pieces of it, ignoring the Witch’s distant warnings. The Witch then captures them and holds them under her spell. With bravery and ingenuity, the children find a way to outwit the Witch. Magically, all of the children whom the Witch has put under a spell over the years are restored back to life. The mother and father find their children. All express gratitude for their salvation.

Time Zone dramaturgy is a contextualizing concept we use to approach performances, especially those like Hansel and Gretel, which exist in multiple times and spaces at once. We engage contingent temporalities (and localities) in dialogue with one another during rehearsals and performance. For this opera production, these time zones are quite vast as we have many operating at once: that of its source material, the Brothers’ Grimm folktale which was published in a compendium in the early 1800s during the German Romantic movement in literature. The stories were penned into permanence to preserve German folklore and culture but have their roots five centuries prior in the Baltic region. This specific story, not originally meant for children (which you will see echoes of here), was then co-opted into the ‘fairy tale’ and adventure genres of strictly defined worlds struggling between good and evil, innocent children who are victims of witches and demons and who must survive through will and wits. Next, the adaptation of the origin story into first a theatrical version for children by Humperdinck’s sister, Adelheid Wette, and then into the opera by Humperdinck himself when he was awed by the musicality of the prose. Directly influenced by some of the key composers of the German Romantic era, one of whom, Richard Strauss, would conduct the first musical notes for the public, Humperdinck’s opera was an immediate success. Thus, an array of performances across continents and oceans followed, representations and revisionings over the century and a half since its 1893 Weimar premiere. Rounding out these time zones is one fused together with the production concept of this particular performance that has its own temporal geopathology grounded in the 1970s and performed for you all today, in the here and now.

I cannot help but be struck by how different the topography of time and location will be from when I’m writing this and when you will be reading it on a mid-November weekend in 2024, in the Power Center for the Performing Arts, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, America. The landscape will have once again shifted. Which direction? What new time zone? I know not now but will then.

So what of this? Why collage and collapse all of these times and places together to sift through world-building an experience for all of you? Whether tangible or not, concrete or fleeting, each iteration–prose, musical, operatic and performative–has written its script upon the body of this text, upon the humans who have performed and composed it and those who have witnessed it across the years and eras. This puts you in a unique position to also write your layer of understanding on the story-ing, to add to the accumulation of meaning that this fairy tale has garnered for centuries, to ask the same questions it poses by its longevity and legacy:

What is it about parenting and the magnitude of responsibility and effort it takes to keep your children safe?

What is it about the enormous imaginations we have as children yet may lose or suppress while we mature and age?

What is it about the unknowns of dark forests, unseen forces, intangible essences that can still shape our lives, can bring us to the brink of disaster, yet safely home again? Or not?

What is it about our voracious appetites for more and more and more, even when we know what we’re consuming, be it refined sugar or wealth, won’t ultimately lead to the fulfillment we desire?

What is it about music that combines many traditions and sounds and arrangements that we simply want to cascade over our senses and bodies and minds to transport us elsewhere, temporarily, to another time and space?

What is it about this story that speaks to the ages?

I pose these questions to each of you as you watch and listen, see and hear. Can you answer them when the curtain closes? Will you? Do you have another? That is what we as dramaturgs (and directors and actors and designers and dancers and choreographers and musicians) try to do for ourselves with each production. Ask questions about its many time zones.

Why?

So we can live in the present of the world we are building without forgetting the importance of the past it has been drawn through. A daunting task you might say. Or…the beauty of the performing arts which imagine a world anew each time the same first note is played or sung again.

For more information on the background of the opera and production concept, click here.

Engelbert Humperdinck (Composer, 1854-1921) was a German composer known for his opera Hänsel und Gretel. Early works were the choral ballads Die Wallfahrt nach Kevlaar (1878; The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar), Das Glück von Edenhall (1884; “The Luck of Edenhall”), and the Humoreske (1879) for orchestra. Hänsel und Gretel, conducted by Richard Strauss, was produced at Weimar on December 23, 1893. The libretto, by the composer’s sister Adelheid Wette, was based on the folktale made familiar by the Brothers Grimm. In this work Humperdinck showed an understanding of a child’s mind and a sense of poetry, notably in the atmosphere of the woodland scene at twilight and in the realistic effects in the episode of the broken milk jug. The Wagnerian harmonies, the simple tunes, and the resourceful orchestration maintain the musical interest on a high level.

Between 1895 and 1919 Humperdinck produced six more operas, including Dornröschen (1902; “Sleeping Beauty”) and Königskinder (1910; “Royal Children”), but neither they nor the spectacle Das Mirakel (1911; “The Miracle”) enhanced his prestige. He also wrote incidental music for plays by Aristophanes, William Shakespeare, and Maurice Maeterlinck; Maurische Rhapsodie (1898; “Moorish Rhapsody”) for orchestra; a string quartet; works for piano; and songs.

– Encyclopedia Brittanica

Adelheid Wette (Librettist, 1858–1916) grew up in Siegburg with her brother, Engelbert Humperdinck. She married the Cologne doctor Hermann Wette, who shared her interest in folktales, and had written two folktale-inspired librettos for the composer Arnold Mendelssohn. Wette and Humperdinck originally devised Hänsel und Gretel as a play with folksongs to be performed by Wette’s children. Later she successfully enlarged her text into a fully fledged libretto.

Wette also collaborated with Humperdinck on the fairytale entertainment for children Die sieben Geisslein (The Seven Young Kids, 1895), which, like Hänsel und Gretel, was based on a story by the Brothers Grimm. Her other works include the children’s play Froschkönig (The Frog King, 1896) and a collection of songs, the Deutsches Kinderliederbuch (1903).

– Opera America

Sly Pup Productions

Anishinaabeg gaa bi dinokiiwaad temigad manda Michigan Kichi Kinoomaagegamig. Mdaaswi nshwaaswaak shi mdaaswi shi niizhawaaswi gii-sababoonagak, Ojibweg, Odawaag, minwaa Bodwe’aadamiig wiiba gii-miigwenaa’aa maamoonjiniibina Kichi Kinoomaagegamigoong wi pii-gaa aanjibiigaadeg Kichi-Naakonigewinning, debendang manda aki, mampii Niisaajiwan, gewiinwaa niijaansiwaan ji kinoomaagaazinid. Daapanaming ninda kidwinan, megwaa minwaa gaa bi aankoosejig zhinda akiing minwaa gii-miigwewaad Kichi-Kinoomaagegamigoong aanji-daapinanigaade minwaa mshkowenjigaade.

The University of Michigan is located on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe people. In 1817, the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodewadami Nations made the largest single land transfer to the University of Michigan. This was offered ceremonially as a gift through the Treaty at the Foot of the Rapids so that their children could be educated. Through these words of acknowledgment, their contemporary and ancestral ties to the land and their contributions to the University are renewed and reaffirmed.

03 – Hansel und Gretel_program