Hansel and Gretel & Rapunzel

The specially designed format, which offers two half-hour fairy tales per performance, illustrates how closely the idiosyncratic appeal of these stories, their special comedy and the spooky tension are linked to everyone's deep-rooted fears and hopes.

In no time, the stage is transformed into an opulently set table with something for everyone: highly entertaining joy.

The daily shock reports of abandonment and abuse arouse our outrage, and we turn to the stock market or sports in disgust. But when Hansel and Gretel secretly sneak into our hut, they are long dead: spoiled, frozen, consumed. The little corpses, withdrawn and shy, confess to us what happened to them. And somehow the ghosts manage to drag us along into their nameless horror: we become the child ourselves, standing around godlessly in the cold forest night, left alone, lost... Mom? Father? Doesn't anyone hear us? Is there no help coming from anywhere? No? No, only the evil witch hears our calls and everything, everything keeps getting worse: Not a nice fairy tale, that! Because it's not a fairy tale.

“Rapunzel, let me down your hair...”, words of a fairy tale that are at least as well known as its authors, who recorded them in writing for posterity. Everyone knows this fairy tale: a story of the fulfillment of the most long-held wishes and the first great and everlasting love. But if we let this fairy tale become reality, it begins to take possession of us and suddenly the characters become part of us. Suddenly it is the fairy tale that observes and questions the viewer. Everything is turned upside down and abysses open up that can only find expression in an opulent baroque opera.