Following Regent's Park Open Air Theatre's collaboration with the English National Opera on The Turn of the Screw last year, the two companies team up once more to present a production of Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel.
Directed by Open Air Theatre artistic director Timothy Sheader, the production will feature members of the ENO Orchestra conducted by Ben Glassberg for this operatic retelling of the Grimm Brothers' fairytale sung in English.
Written in the late 19th century, Humperdinck was inspired by the fairytale's folk-music themes and worked with his sister Adelheid Wette to produce the opera. It premiered in Weimar in 1893, and was first seen in England in 1894, when it opened at London's Daly's Theatre.
The well-known German fairy tale tells the story of a brother and sister kidnapped by a witch living in a house made of sweets, deep in the forest, and sees Hansel and Gretel attempt to outsmart the witch to escape.
Hansel and Gretel is part of the new Regent's Park Open Air Theatre season, which also includes stagings of Thornton Widler's Our Town, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Evita.