ArtsWatch

Friday and Sunday are your last two chances to see the Opera Company of Philadelphia's production of Maurice Sendak's sweet take on Hänsel und Gretel at the Academy of Music. As I wrote recently, it's the production you wish you had seen as a kid. And yet there's a very grown-up score that's an endless source of marvel.
The photo here is a shot of the painted screen that comes down on stage at the opera's intermission, and this feast scene (no doubt Sendak's rendering of the food our starving hero and heroine sing about in the opera's opening) is my way of saying that unless there's startling news in the next few days ArtsWatch will go on intermission until Monday.
In the meantime, if you've missed Sendak's cheery, storybook Hänsel und Gretel, you might look forward to the Met production opening Dec. 24 and being broadcast to movie theaters nationally Jan 1.
Or maybe the August Everding film from 1980 is more your speed. For me, the witch-at-oven scene at the end is a little too close for comfort, looking like architectural salvage from Germany c. 1945. But what you do get that's wonderful is a truly moving Hermann Prey in the role of the father, Sena Jurinac as the witch, Georg Solti conducting, and the Vienna Philharmonic.
The Philharmonic by the way is the orchestra on what's still the best recording out there, the 1964 EMI re-release with André Cluytens conducting.