The Bronx Opera returns for its Spring performances with something of a departure from its norm.  To be sure, it adheres to its customary template of presenting a well-known opera in the Spring, yet by choosing Hansel and Gretel as its focus, the Bronx Opera makes an inspired decision to perform a piece that could serve to introduce the world of opera to the younger generation.

One of the best known and most beloved fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel was published by the Grimm Brothers in 1812 in a volume containing scores of other legendary short stories such as Snow White and Cinderella.  By 1893, Engelbert Humperdinck – no, not the Las Vegas schmaltz-meister, the original German composer – turned the beloved story into a full-blown three-act opera to largely rave reviews.  It is this version that the Bronx Opera adapts for its May session.

The Bronx Opera's rendition of Humperdink's Hansel and Gretel is brilliantly brought to life by the Bronx Opera's founder, Michael Spierman who draws lush, room-filling sound from his full orchestra of almost three dozen extremely talented musicians.  Spierman's son Benjamin serves as Stage Director and translated the opera so that it could be fully performed in English while maintaining the integrity and wit of the original.

As is usual for a Bronx Opera production, there are standout and noteworthy performances aplenty.  In the cast we saw, Allison Pohl was charming and charismatic as Gretel and Bronx Opera vet Hannah Rosenbaum makes a memorable impression in a brief but pivotal role as the Sandman.  It should be noted that this rendition of the opera continues the tradition of the original in that the role of Hansel is performed by a female – a so-called "pants" role – and Jennifer Caruana does a fine job as the mischievous Hansel.  On the technical side, the many projections used to suggest the forest, the witches flying across the sky, and the gingerbread house are clever, colorful, and inventive and were quite effective tools in the school of doing more with less.

Image credit: The Bronx Opera Company

If we have one critique of Hansel and Gretel, it is with the third act, which follows the intermission.  At this point, the children are awakened by the Dew Fairy and soon find themselves at the mercy of the evil Gingerbread Witch.  This is where the story should kick into high gear and the action should rise toward a satisfying climax, but in spite of the fact that the children are captured and Hansel is being fattened in preparation for his eventual fate as a tasty morsel, no sense of underlying tension is ever achieved.  Therefore, when the children find the courage and resourcefulness to outsmart the witch and push her into her own oven, the thrill of giddy catharsis that shoud be felt by the audience is somewhat diminished.

Much of the problem is with the underlying source material.  Humperdinck, in trying to lift Hansel and Gretel from its childhood folk tale origins to an opera worthy of serious consideration by adults may have succeeded all too well.  The composer's Wagnerian influences are apparent, but are structurally too rigid, serving to deflate much of the playfulness and imaginative spark inherent in the concept.  In the past, we've seen fantastic results where the Bronx Opera stayed extremely close to the source material they adapted and did not take too many liberties, but in this case with such kid-friendly material, why not?

The staging of this production was perhaps too well-mannered where a little cutting loose would have worked wonders.  The production design was fun and colorful, and we would have liked to have seen things taken even further.  Having the witch's entrance moved off-stage and directly into the audience where she could pop up unexpectedly, for example, might have provoked shrieks of laughter from the many children that were in attendance.  Or use the many video screens adorning the stage to have the witch's ugly mug projected in large size on four screens simultaneously as she sings her entrance number.  On a similar note, the witch's performance could have been made more broadly campy as her presence comprises the money shots of this oft-told tale and therefore needed to make much more of an impact than they do here.  Everything about the witch, from the costume to the entrance to the performance should have been bigger, grander, and just plain more fun. 

Image credit: The Bronx Opera Company

While remaining faithful to the original, it might have been a canny idea for Spierman to have another story in the back of his mind that uses much the same template: lost child trying to get back home, but running afoul of an evil witch and singing songs along the way – The Wizard of Oz – to try to attain the same larger-than-life tone particularly in the witch's performance.

Humperdinck's opera ends up being a creation that is neither fish nor fowl – not weighty enough to engage a fully adult audience, yet not cartoonishly preposterous enough to have the kids leaping out of their seats in excitement.  Still, the Bronx Opera does a commendable job in bringing this flawed gem to the stage and it is a largely effective gateway to the world of opera for the little ones – a nice night out for the entire family.

There are still two more performances left to the Bronx Opera's Hansel and Gretel, and tickets should still be available for their Long Island shows at Hofstra University.  Please visit the Bronx Opera's website for more information and to keep up with future projects and their ongoing mission to make classical opera affordable and accessible to everyone.

To listen to our previous interviews with the Bronx Opera Company's Ben Spierman, click here.

Now that the 2011-2012 television season will be coming to an end in a couple of weeks, we thought it would be a good time to summarize the announcements that the five broadcast networks have made regarding the fates of their television schedules.  Some shows are still undecided, but the fates of most of their lineups are now known:

Throughout his life, Chuck Jones was a dreamer.  He was always able to tap into the child within himself as part of his creative process, and children and dreams are both ever-present themes and inspirations to Jones during his long career.  That much is evident to anyone who had ever met the man or even those of us who were only fortunate enough to be entertained by his deep catalog of animated cartoon classics.  In addition to creating the Roadrunner and Pepe Le Pew series, Jones is responsible for some of the most famous Warner Bros. cartoons in their canon: "What's Opera, Doc?," "One Froggy Evening," the Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck/Elmer Fudd Hunting Trilogy, and literally scores more.  Of course, children and dreams are perfectly encapsulated in Jones' two Ralph Phillips cartoons.  But from a mind as active and creative as Jones' was, not all dreams could be realized.  In Chuck Jones: The Dream That Never Was, we are taken on a remarkable journey through a twenty-year period in Jones' life that was a mere footnote in most texts about the man – if it got a mention at all. 

Chuck Jones: The Dream That Never Was weighs in at about 280 pages, and there's not a wasted paragraph among them.  The book is neatly divided into six sections that chronicle the full story of Crawford in all its various iterations over two decades – but this project's ambitions don't stop there.

The book opens with a massive 43 page essay by Kurtis Findlay that not only outlines Chuck Jones' various attempts to get Crawford before the public – both successful and not – but also covers his entire career with a particular emphasis on his post-Warner Bros. accomplishments.  That makes this book especially valuable as this period is less well-documented than his salad days as one of the guiding forces behind Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.  Findlay's prose is at once thorough, enlightening, and entertaining, and he guides us expertly through the highlights of Jones' tenure at MGM and beyond.  Chuck Jones is justifiably one of the premier figures of the Golden Age of Animation, and his career at Warners has been discussed in great depth in any number of tomes, but his post-Warner career remains scarcely-mined territory so there are many stories just waiting to be told of this period.  Truthfully, Jones had such a long and prolific creative life that every day was likely a new adventure and each phase of Jones' career could without a doubt support a book of its own.  Even Jones' supposed misfires and failures are more interesting than the highlights of many other animators and warrant an in-depth study. 

Chuck Jones passed away in 2002, and while his immense body of work does speak for itself, it is always interesting and instructive to hear the stories behind the story – the story of the gestation process of a project and how it finally saw completion – or not.  That's what makes well-written text pieces like Findlay's such crucial reading.  Findlay doesn't give us a dry recitation of the facts; he successfully captures the essence of who Jones was as a person and as a creator.  Through the anecdotes chronicling his time as head of MGM animation and his later stint at ABC children's programming (where's that book?), we are shown a Chuck Jones who wants more than anything to push the boundaries of what is possible in the television animation format.  Jones never gives up this goal even in the face of continued ambivalence our outright apathy from the studio and network executives.

Upon being dismissed from Warner Bros. due to his moonlighting as writer of the screenplay for UPA's Gay Purr-ee, Jones was quickly snatched up by MGM where he created a series of Tom and Jerry shorts that played throughout the 60s. 

To his credit, Findlay doesn't try to whitewash the past; he gives full details about how much of Jones' post-Warner work was not unanimously well-received – both his Tom and Jerry series and the other projects he created for MGM.  For instance, although Jones won an Oscar for his classic short, "The Dot and The Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics," the author of the book it was

based upon, Norton Juster, reportedly hated the result.  Juster had a similar reaction to Jones' feature-length treatment of one of his other books, The Phantom Tollbooth.  To one degree or another, Jones met with dissatisfaction from the authors of other works he interpreted while at MGM including Dr. Seuss on the adaptations of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Horton Hears a Who, Frank Tashlin (the director whose animation unit Jones took over upon Tashlin's exit from Warner) on "The Bear That Wasn't,"  and the great Walt Kelly whose signature creation was brought to television by Jones in 1969's Pogo's Special Birthday Special.  Perhaps the heart of the problem was that Jones was adapting other people's material and in fleshing them out for the very different media of television and film, imprinted too much of his own voice and sensibilities on stories that were very personal to their authors.  This is in marked contrast to the Looney Tunes stars who were really committee characters and thus malleable enough to withstand the differing interpretations of multiple directors.

Findlay weaves a fascinating tapestry delineating how Jones began developing the character and world of Crawford in 1967 for a proposed television animated series, and how he worked on it with his wife through various refinements until it was ready to pitch to MGM in 1969.  However, nothing came of it as Jones' busy schedule coupled with the closing of MGM's animation unit after the completion of The Phantom Tollbooth scuttled any plans to bring Crawford to television.

However, in 1977, another opportunity arose to bring Crawford to life albeit not on television, but in the pages of the daily newspaper comic strips.  In 1977, Robert Reed (no, not the Brady Bunch dad) of the Tribune Company approached Jones with the idea of creating his own comic strip for his group of newspapers that would feature a set of kids to compete with Peanuts, the hugely successful strip that was part of the United Features Syndicate stable.  To that end, Jones dusted off his Crawford proposal and reworked it and the characters for the daily newspaper strip format.  The strip premiered in January 1978 in the New York  Daily News and a handful of smaller papers.  It is unknown why the Chuck Jones name did not have enough star power to get his strip picked up by more papers, but our own analysis of the results show a lack of cohesion and continuity in the seven months the strip was in existence.  Jones had a lot of ideas, but failed to take the time to create distinctive and convincing characters to execute those ideas.  Jones' trademark witticisms and wordplay are in full effect, make no mistake.  But with few exceptions, the dialogue could be exchanged between characters with little to no effect on the outcome.  The biggest obstacle to the public's being able to embrace the strip is that the titular character is actually the least interesting in the bunch.  In the first few weeks of the strip, Crawford serves merely as straight man to his buddy Morgan, who initiates much of the action.  On the whole, the Crawford cast is less interesting than their Peanuts counterparts: Crawford, Morgan, and Libby never engage, provoke, or touch us the way Charlie Brown, Linus, and Lucy do.

Also, during the course of the strip's life, its stars Crawford and Morgan undergo radical shifts in character traits and even physical appearance.  The gang seems to age several years overnight again proving that the concept needed more thought and development time before seeing print.

Still, as a collected work, this book is a marvelous achievement by all involved.  The Library of American Comics – spearheaded by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell – already have such a deep catalog of hit books to be proud of that, from an editorial perspective, it must be a daunting task to keep coming up with projects to top themselves.  We're glad to report that with Chuck Jones: The Dream That Never Was, they really have upped the ante on what has come before. 

Image from Chuck Jones: The Dream That Never Was [Image credit: The Library of American Comics]

This book is a must-have for any fan of comic strips, animation, or Chuck Jones himself.  Chuck's strips, storyboards, and sketches – and there are heaping gobs of it published here to drool over – occupy the lion's share of the book.  That signature angular style Jones developed in the 1950s is here on display in all its charm.  Chuck Jones, the artist, ranks up there with the best cartoonists that the newspaper or animation media ever produced.  He had a mastery of body language – including the iconic sideways glance to the audience – which few artists could match and it was always effectively employed to convey character, mood, and subtext.  With the precision of a surgeon, Jones always knew how big or small he needed the action to go in order to get the reaction from the audience that he wanted.

The Library of American Comics is no stranger to accolades for their works, which have won Eisner Awards in the Best Archival Collection category three times already.  While the recent Flash Gordon and Jungle Jim volume 1 (reviewed elsewhere on this site) is the more obvious Eisner-bait for this year's awards, we think Chuck Jones: The Dream That Never Was is the more deserving and hope it at least gets a nomination.  Chuck Jones is the kind of book that needs to see print because it gives full detail and context to a period in the artist's life that had heretofore been a footnote at best.  Just when you thought you knew all you could about Jones, this book comes along and provides an exciting opportunity for discovery that adds a thrilling undercurrent to each turn of the page and makes the reading experience that much more rewarding.  Yes, the stories on the page are fun, whimsical, and charming, but the story behind the story is the bigger prize and one that will make The Dream That Never Was a go-to reference for both animation and Chuck Jones aficionados now and for decades into the future.