'HANSEL UND GRETEL' LANDS IN IMMIGRANTS' MANHATTAN.

Byline: Reed Johnson Staff Writer

To Eastern European peasants arriving at Ellis Island, America seemed the land of milk and honey, a country so sweetly succulent you might dream of breaking off a piece and scarfing it down whole.

The reality, of course, was that for most of the wretched refuse, those goodies were effectively off-limits: In money-hungry turn-of-the-century America, newcomers were as likely to be eaten as to eat.

Director James Robinson has taken this idea as the backdrop and subtext for his exceptionally clever, if inconsistently served production of Engelbert Humperdinck's ``Hansel und Gretel,'' an opera that braces its sugary folk melodies with several good jolts of Wagnerian moodiness. While the power of the bilingual singing (German and English) falls measurably short of Robinson's directorial boldness, the cumulative effect of this cinematically fluid co-production with New York City Opera is exhilarating, like a glucose rush to the brain.

Setting the action in Manhattan, circa 1890, Robinson turns Gretel (Australian soprano Clare Gormley in her Los Angeles Opera debut) and her brother (mezzo-soprano Paula Rasmussen) into a pair of Lower East Side tenement-dwellers eager to taste the good life in their adopted home.

Smartly condensed into two acts, the production opens in the children's cramped hovel, cropped to claustrophobic proportions by John Conklin's set design. Later it expands to encompass the wilds of Central Park and the Witch's home, envisioned here as a monstrous Victorian mansion eerily lined with Lewis Hine-style photographs of ``missing'' children. The spectacle, which is given an old-fangled, stereopticon cast by lighting designer Paul Palazzo, grows bigger as the siblings' imaginative quest enlarges from naturalism to fantasy.

Though vocally less full-bodied than might be hoped for, at least on opening night, both Gormley and Rasmussen are singers with distinct personalities and strong actors to boot. Gormley, looking feral and gaunt, slightly oversells Gretel's twitchy eccentricity but successfully gets across her vulnerability, while the more relaxed Rasmussen demonstrates an impressively wide if vocally understated emotional range.

They unite in affecting harmony in their duet that precedes the famous Dream Pantomime. Robinson re-imagines this lovely orchestral sequence's 14 angels as genteel middle-class Anglo-Saxon New Yorkers, attired all in white - benevolent spirits who nonetheless stay aloof from the grubby Old World arrivals.

The production also transforms the Sandman into a raggedy street-lamp lighter (Megan Dey-Toth delivers the graceful aria) while preserving the Dew Fairy (Catherine Ireland) more or less as written.

Ironically, given its imaginative pluck, the production misses some chances to engage its audience emotionally. While baritone John Atkins and soprano Lesley Leighton bring domestic-comedy gusto to their roles as the children's parents, Judith Christin underplays the Witch's creepy-campy possibilities.

More distracting, when Hansel and Gretel turn the tables on the Witch, the triumphant serenade of newly liberated children, performed by the Los Angeles Children's Chorus, was faint to the point of being inaudible, leaving at least this viewer's heartstrings unplucked.

Conductor William Vendice and his orchestra impart some appropriately mongrelized shadings to the score's pastoral Teutonic colors. For all its sophistication, the production stays admirably true to the fairy-tale heart of the matter, while conveying the holiday reminder that, even in fat times, there are plenty of lean among us.

The facts

What: ``Hansel und Gretel.''

Where: Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown.

When: Performances at 1 p.m. today and Dec. 19; and 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Dec. 21.

Tickets: $27, $52, $82, $84, $115, $128 and $146. Call [phone], or visit www.laopera.org/ on the Web.

Our rating: Two and one half stars.

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Photo

Photo: Manhattan in the 1890s is the setting for Los Angeles Opera's production of Engelbert Humperdinck's ``Hansel und Gretel.''