Jell-O flies. Cakes sail. Tarts splat.
It's a grubslinger's delight of pudding and pastries, the best food fight since "Animal House."
We're at a rehearsal of the opera "Hansel and Gretel," the fairy tale about hunger, abandonment and a witch who lives in a gingerbread house. The singers are gorging on sweets while they race around a table the length of three test kitchens, scooping up handfuls of cake, cramming cream puffs into their mouths and pitching food hither and yon. The table groans under real cakes, pies, tarts, pastries and puddings -- enough to feed Utah.
Like the Grimm Brothers fairy tale, food and a lack of it are themes running throughout Englebert Humperdinck's neo-Wagnerian masterpiece. Portland Opera's production includes a food fight in the last act, when the starving brother and sister discover the Witch's house.
"Greedy little mousy, stop nibbling at my housey," sings Allan Glassman, a regular of the Metropolitan Opera, dolled up to look like either Julia Child or Dame Edna, with ample waist, enormous bosom and thick ankles crammed into sensible shoes.
To fatten up the wee pretties before popping them into the oven, the Witch clambers onto the table to make her nondiet concoctions. The music pushes higher and higher. Her face covered in Cool Whip, she slops strawberry almond milk into a blender with grapes, bananas, rice pudding and cocoa powder. Gretel crams mousse, meringues, tarts and a whole fish into a Mixmaster.
All about the kitchen
Instead of the opera's traditional settings (woodsman's home, forest, Witch's house), the show places each act in a kitchen, emphasizing the hunger angle. Act I remains fairly realistic, but Act 2 moves into a German expressionistic style suggestive of playwright Frank Wedekind's "Spring Awakening." Act 3 is theater of the absurd, Davis says.
Plastic sheets hang floor to ceiling to protect the perimeter of the rehearsal room. A nonskid cloth covers the floor because Gretel slipped and fell on something edible the other day.
By the end of the rehearsal, the Witch is toast and the set looks like "Chefs Gone Wild." Jell-O streaks the floor. Frosting spatters the table. Cake crumbs from a perfect Black Forest cake topped with cherries and dusted with cocoa powder clump underfoot.
And you should see the singers. Frosting covers the face, shorts and suspenders of Sandra Piques Eddy, who sings Hansel. Maureen McKay's Gretel looks like she's been dragged through the mud, with gobs of mousse, Jell-O, rice pudding, cream puffs and cake sticking to her face, hair, dress, stockings and shoes.
And everything is edible, from the meringues to the profiteroles. They have to be, Davis says, because the singers eat a lot in this show, timing their singing between cramming food into their mouths.
"This particular cast is gung-ho for eating," Davis says. "I've insisted on mountains of food."
Only one hitch. Two, actually.
McKay (Gretel) is diabetic and can't tolerate gluten, so all the food must be free of sugar and gluten. That means no buying bulk items from discount stores. Every cake, pie and pastry for rehearsals and performances is handmade.
Enter pastry chef Kyra Bussanich of Crave Bake Shop, hired to create each batch of goodies for every one of the 15 rehearsals and performances. That's 165 hours of labor.
Take away gluten and sugar -- two of baking's best friends -- and you end up experimenting and adapting a lot, says Bussanich, who normally bakes without gluten, but definitely with sugar. Samples tested well with the cast, but her single disappointment has been the Tower of Jell-O. The director wanted it tall, then taller, but on this day, her quivering masterpiece collapsed on the drive over.
"It looked like a grenade had gone off," she says.
As to how she feels knowing her hard work ends up scooped, smashed and tossed about, she says, "In the spirit of the opera, I'm fine. I will say, as much as I love to create things, I always say, 'I create, you can cut.' I don't destroy."
Armed with food
The show's food budget of $4,844 includes $215.20 for raspberries, $390 for sponge cake, $325 for Jell-O and -- the most expensive item -- $936 for meringues. Bussanich is an opera and ballet fan, so she charged half price on the cakes.
The captain overseeing the food fight is Jennifer Hammontree, stage manager.
"It's not just chaotic, it's guerilla warfare chaos," she says. "It's the biggest food show I've done. Who's ever done a show with this much food?"
Cleaning up requires a brigade of shovels, brooms, mops, buckets and cloths.
"It smells like a 4-year-old's birthday party in here," Hammontree says, surveying the table of sweets. "I'm needing some pulled pork."
At rehearsals, Hammontree takes notes from director Davis, then types them up and distributes them the same night so the cast and crew will have them in the morning. It's a prop-heavy show and requires pages more notes than usual, she says.
"The sauerkraut is very smelly -- do you have any alternate suggestions for a food item which looks like sauerkraut but is more edible?"
"Please make the almonds shaved, not round."
"The sugar-free meringues arrived. They are too small, so let's go with the multi-color full sugar meringues. They should be the size of a demitasse saucer."
Turning serious for a moment, director Davis says that stage curtains will reinforce the hunger theme with painted images of cutlery, plates and a mouth and tongue. "I think hunger brings up all these issues of how we treat food and what its significance is," he says. "The idea of cannibalism in Act 3 is transformative for the children, a rite of passage. A victory over fear and darkness."
But what about all that food going to waste?
"We're very mindful of that," Davis says. "One of the responses from the cast was, 'All those cakes are made for that purpose.' Act 3 is meant to disturb and disrupt our preconception of what we see. If it does shock people, then I think it's in the spirit of the show, to bring home the message of how much respect we have for what we consume and where it comes from. As a device, it should hopefully both entertain and provoke some thought."
To underscore the hunger theme, Portland Opera and the Oregon Food Bank are holding a food drive at each performance, asking for nonperishable food donations.
No cake, please.