Chicago.(Hansel und Gretel)

Parents who brought their children to Lyric Opera's December performances of Hansel und Gretel expecting a warmhearted holiday entertainment were in for a rude awakening. The company's new Richard Jones--John MacFarlane production seemed more likely to provoke nightmares than provide enchantment.

For all its excesses, Christopher Alden's controversial, sexually explicit staging of Rigoletto, seen last season at the Lyric, was at least true to the amoral milieu of the Duke's court, and it presented a thought-provoking take on a familiar work. Jones did much the same with his austere yet highly effective staging of Janacek's Jenufa here last season. But this Hansel (seen Dec. 19) was a perverse and relentlessly vulgar revisionist staging.

There's no disputing that the cautionary children's fable -- especially in the Grimm Brothers' original version -- has plenty of lurking unpleasantness along with its gingerbread huts and kindly sprites. But this co-production with Welsh National Opera (originally seen in Cardiff in 1999) goes beyond the story's dark shadows to revel in post-modern ugliness, creating a bleak Freudian landscape where poverty, family dysfunction and twenty-first-century neuroses reign.

In this production, Jones and company contemptuously jettison Humperdinck's magic and consoling spirituality, smearing the opera with a greasy coating of smugly decadent Eurotrash grunge. Hansel and Gretel are petulant, resentful neurotics rather than innocent, adventurous kids. Gretel reacts to her mother's scolding by abruptly lapsing into catatonia, and the children's dances are not lighthearted capers but, as choreographed by Linda Dobell, spastic, passive-aggressive shadow-boxing. Peter is a drunken, lustful lout, Gertrude a pill-popping, suicidal battle-axe in high heels and bottle-blond beehive. When Peter tells her of the dangers confronting the children from the Witch in the forest, she conveys her maternal concern ...