At the beginning of November, the Lower School were treated to a musical rendition of the traditional fairy-tale ‘Hansel and Gretel’. The Marginalia Theatre company, lead by Dr Chloe Allison, one of our visiting singing teachers, took the children on a make-believe adventure encountering a Witch, and burned-out Mother, some scary woods and a lot of cake!
Based on Engelbert Humperdinck’s nineteenth-century classic opera the story was adapted and updated for our young audience. This production represented most of our pupils’ first encounter with opera and they were mesmerised throughout. The Witch, who eats the children in the original fairy-tale, opts to steal their beautiful singing voices instead. Dr Allison and her colleagues wrote a new English translation of the work where they cleverly weave the original fairy-tale narration into the colourful Wagnerian musical landscape of Humperdinck.
CPS pupils were incredibly lucky to have experienced such high quality music right here at school. It was wonderful to hear their enthusiastic comments at the end. Thank you, Marginalia!
