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The Theater: New Operetta in Manhattan

4 minute read
TIME

Candide (based on Voltaire’s satire; book by Lillian Hellman; score by Leonard Bernstein; lyrics by Richard Wilbur; other lyrics by John Latouche and Dorothy Parker) is a medley of the brilliant, the uneven, the exciting, the earthbound, the adventurous and the imperfectly harmonized. It is not an especially Voltairian Candide; more significantly, it is not in the least a conventional Broadway musical, for the very good reason that it plainly never sought to be.

In his famous 18th century satire against facile optimism and idealism, Voltaire had guileless young Candide’s tutor, Dr. Pangloss, teach him that this is the best of all possible worlds. Chanting his faith, he and his tutor and his sweetheart Cunegonde are catapulted from one misfortune to the next, witnessing or enduring in 20 pages more crime, misery and calamity than exist in all Greek tragedy; in fact, Candide himself, “the mildest man in the world,” is constantly killing people. At long last he is led from idealism to the commonsense of keeping strictly to his own concerns, of cultivating his garden.

One of the bitterest books ever written, Candide is also one of the gayest—its razor-edged, wit-propelled story generally galloping at such speed as to make its fantastic pile-up of catastrophes almost as hilarious as they are horrifying. Converting Candide into a “comic operetta” is perforce a major operation. For the whizzing variety of incident must be duplicated by musical, visual, verbal, choreographic variety of treatment. Seldom, thanks to Scene Designer Oliver Smith and Costume Designer Irene Sharaff, has calamity been more glowingly or sumptuously caparisoned; such things as the stage set of Lisbon and the Guardi-like Venetian figures are superb. And seldom has so complicated a show received such expert and animated staging as Tyrone Guthrie has provided.

It is over the crucial blending and balancing of libretto and score that difficulties arise, partly from differences in tempo and tone, partly from the operetta medium itself. What is most inspired and Voltairian about Candide must plague operetta writing. Voltaire’s book is much better suited to a film, which could approximate the breakneck pace and have a field day with the calamities; or to pure opera, which wholly through music could catch the book’s speed, glancing wit and mocking elan.

Denied all this, Lillian Hellman’s libretto also bears her own strong impress, which is foreign to Voltaire’s. Where Voltaire is ironic and bland, she is explicit and vigorous. Where he makes lightning, rapier thrusts, she provides body blows. Where he is diabolical, Playwright Hellman is humanitarian.

Whatever its own weight and thrust, the libretto distorts Voltaire’s formula without really forging one of its own. and seems too serious for the verve and mocking lyricism of Leonard Bernstein’s score, which — without being strictly 18th century—maintains, with its gay pastiche of past styles and forms, a period quality. Instead of show tunes, the score goes in for something akin to Sullivan’s spoofing in The Gondoliers, offering the wonderful paste coloratura of a Glitter and Be Gay, duets and quartet finales, and schottisches and waltzes that can be danced. Along with much engaging music of this kind, there are generally bright and amusing lyrics, and. in Barbara Cook, Irra Petina and Robert Rounseville, the right kind of singers.

Only Max Adrian, as Pangloss, is enough of an actor to do right by the libretto. Nor, for all its good things, has Candide enough unity or sustained effect to come off as a whole. But the best of it is as superior to Broadway musicals in quality as virtually all of it is in aim.

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