Do not "dislike"

“Genzel and Gretel”, the first premiere of this season in the “New Opera”, is positioned as a performance for family viewing. I would add - mandatory. This is happiness, not a performance! This is the case when you regret that the child has already grown, but there are no grandchildren yet.

A composer with a hard -pronounced by local parents by the name Engelbert Humperddink is the author of the most famous children's opera Genzel and Gretel, written on the Libretto Adelehaid Vetta based on the fairy tale of the Grimm brothers. Outside of our country, for more than a hundred years, it performs the function of the Nutcracker (Humperddinka and Tchaikovsky’s opera - almost peers: 1893 and 1892). First -class music, a touching fairy tale, a luxurious sunset of romanticism. In tsarist Russia, the opera was under the name "Masha and Vanya", in Soviet times it was forgotten due to Christian content and now looks already lost by a pearl.

All over the world, meanwhile, it is very popular and, although it is about collecting forest berries, is traditionally put on Christmas. The authors of a Russian text specially made for a new production - Ekaterina Pospelova and Olga Prokhorova - approached the case creatively and still strengthened the Christmas theme. Genzel (Anna Sinitsyna) and Gretel (Ekaterina Mironcheva) - brother and sister, hungry, but funny. Father (Ilya Kuzmin) drinks, mother (Natalya Kyshlin) is tired of life and hysteria. Having got excited, she drives the children into the forest for food, they are lost, almost fall into the stove of the gingerbread witch Knusper Hex, making gingerbread from children (the full name of the performance in the “New Opera” - “Gingerbread House, or Genzel and Gretel”). But everything costs, the magical forest defends children's sleep, the father is sober, the mother comes to her senses, the witch is baked in the furnace, numerous children, already previously scourged by her, return to life, and Genzel and Gretel hug with happy parents and sing the praise of God.

In addition to the understandable witty text and real musical quality without discounts on the age category 0+ (the Khumperdinka Pregoner beauty is enthusiasticly resolved by Andrei Lebedev) The performance is remarkable with the directing and cheerful visual fantasy. This is the third after Salome and Faust the work of Ekaterina Odevova and Ethel Ishpa; This time, the young girl’s team was replenished with the artist Anna Kostrikova. They say that the budget of the performance was completely frivolous: for the situation in the parental house of the main characters, the kitchen utensils of the Soviet period were collected throughout Facebook, I even identified my cast -iron frying pan on stage. But by someone, and a poor relative of modern, scenographically costly opera products, the Gingerbread House does not look.

The main place for magic is the night forest in which children have lost. He is terrible, and alluring, and kind at the same time. To do this, it is enough to be too to be too much with lighting (the artist in the light is Timofei Ermolin), send the artists to the ground in time so that the whole baby would jump from their places, invent a whole series of fantastic characters, one more beautiful than the other. A huge blue goat virtually wags its tail, an alarming mother with a stroller and forever frozen in the winds of purple hair always loses the baby, old-moth, children, a berry, a mermaid with long hair and a comb-you won’t keep up with everyone! And then a witch (virtuoso acting solo Tenor Dmitry Pyanov) amusedly refuels overhead boobs under the dress, and fourteen angels come out of the opened abyss of the abyss of the abyss.

In the final, an alarming mother with a nourish-wound baby is seated in a Christmas ark, other fantastic characters are also useful for him, the berries are collected, the children have matured, the parents are forgiven, the holiday came.