CANDIDE
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So the professor doffs his elbow-patched jacket for a white wig to portray the philosopher Pangloss, a cockeyed optimist whose maxim that “all’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds” leads him to amazing heights of rationalization, for everything from wholesale wartime slaughter to his own syphilitic ravages. One nice-looking pair of students take on the roles of Candide and Cunegonde, the idealistic young lovers separated by war, earthquake, the Inquisition, sexual enslavement, and various other disasters that they invariably manage to survive until they can find each other again. Another, less wholesome pair of students become Maximillian, Cunegonde’s vain fool of a brother, and Paquette, Cunegonde’s slutty chambermaid, whose global travels periodically intersect with those of Candide, Cunegonde, and Pangloss. They all end up together, a great deal the worse and the wiser for their wear and tear, wrung dry of noble pretensions and ready to get on with the work of simply living. Then the “students” drop their roles and return to “class,” filing out into the auditorium to sing the show’s climactic chorale “Make Our Garden Grow” before they head off to their next class.
Trite? Improbable? You bet. But it works. By framing Bernstein’s famously difficult, supersophisticated musical with such a silly, simpleminded device, Stockley sets a tone of disarming naivete that’s perfect for Candide’s story, so full of impossible coincidences and ridiculous reunions. If the audience will accept that first nonsensical turn of events, they’ll accept just about anything.
Soprano Melissa Dye as Cunegonde, pert and pretty despite being stuck with the world’s worst wig, was in especially good form at the performance I saw–saucy, sweet, and splendidly in control of the fiendishly high and fast melodies and rapid-fire lyrics that characterize her role. Tall, stalwart, Aryan-looking John Schroeder is an able Candide, especially effective in the quieter moments of songs like “Make Our Garden Grow”–though the final hug he gives Cunegonde is wrong, a sentimental move that undermines the wisdom of the moment. B.J. Jones is wry, if a little too restrained, as the foolish philosopher Pangloss–a role meant to evoke Groucho Marx’s pseudo-European shtick as well as Gilbert and Sullivan’s patter-singer characters. But in his function as narrator he keeps the plot moving comprehensibly, which isn’t easy to do. Rick Boynton, Pamela Harden, and Barbara E. Robertson provide solid support as Maximillian, Paquette, and Cunegonde’s duenna (one wishes, however, that this version hadn’t cut the original score’s funniest song, “What’s the Use,” which would have exploited Robertson’s sardonic comic streak). And when these soloists join with the small, superbly coached chorus for the music-hall Inquisition scene (“What a day, what a day, for an auto-da-fe”) or the sublime, not overly solemn a cappella finale, the effect is simply luminous.
