Barnium Meets Voltaire
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage BARNUM MEETS VOLTAIRE By Stefan Kanfer With typical irony, François Marie Arouet gave his lean novella Candide the subtitle "Optimism." Actually it was a grinning critique of the...
...Now reality settles in...
...he had a forcible oddity of style that the most comical of our dramatis personae could not have exceeded...
...Bearing this in mind, a number of producers expressed interest in a revival...
...Nothing seemed beyond him...
...One reading was sufficient for the Great Council in Geneva: They ordered Candide to be burned immediately and the author searched out...
...Prince's version is more concerned with lampooning Barnum and Bailey—hardly a daunting goal...
...In the early '70s the impresario/director presented Candide on Broadway with a rewritten (but still unremarkable) book by Hugh Wheeler, additional lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and an inadequate cast...
...Even so, the director and his co-conspirators cannot sully Leonard Bernstein's sparkling melodies, given a splendid setting by the greatest arranger of his day, Hershey Kay...
...People must have lost their senses to attribute to me that pack of nonsense," he declared with a straight face...
...He had an extravagance...
...No longer young, no longer green, bereft of dreams and trust, the weary pair agree to forget the past and forgive the present, to settle down quietly and let their garden grow...
...Patricia Birch's spastic choreography does little to dispel the aura of a freak show, nor do Judith Dolan's loud costumes and Clarke Dunham's louder sets...
...Among other misadventures, Candide sees his nation pillaged, his guru hanged, his inamorata abducted, raped and stabbed...
...But only Hal Prince could make it happen...
...Yet Candide's final number, "Make Our Garden Grow" is a pure and unaffected tune, sung as it was written, as a hymn to the simple life...
...On a hegira that takes him to Paris, Lisbon, Turkey, and Buenos Aires, he meets a variety of sinful individuals including a baron, a Grand Inquisitor and a pasha (all played by Mal Z. Lawrence...
...Voltaire (to use the name he preferred) peopled the work with all the types he despised: corrupt politicians, avaricious judges, executioners and torturers, military fools and, for good measure, the Roman Catholic Church—with particular attention paid to priapic monks and inquisitors...
...A song like "Oh Happy We," in which the couple plights their troth, each blindly unaware of the other's desires—Cunégonde for a marble palace, Candide for a rustic retreat—is a model of the Italian operatic duet turned on its ear...
...In the title role Danieley excels both as singer and actor, as does Dale, who plays six parts including Voltaire (as the narrator), a businessman, governor, gambler, and sage...
...Although Bernstein liked to talk about his affinity with Mahler, during his periods of impudence he edged closer to Voltaire's personality...
...As usual with this kinetic Englishman, he is all over the stage and sometimes above it, altering personalities and outfits with the ease of a musician changing keys...
...That moment encapsulates the Prince attitude: any anachronism for a laugh, even if it violates Voltaire's spirit...
...Occasionally something effective occurs: Candide's voyage across the seas, for example, is evoked with the use of voluminous waving bolts of cloth...
...A series of secondary comédie roles are filled by performers noted for underlining the obvious...
...for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily have been created for the best end...
...Each expresses a cynicism based on experience and expedience...
...But the public was not fooled...
...fora$75 orchestra seat the ticketholders are entitled to a few in-jokes, right...
...I have, thank God, better occupations...
...That is very true") cannever attend to Wagner in quite the same way again...
...As immense as the stage of the Gershwin is, the director manages to crowd it with tumblers and clowns, aerial suspensions and nonstop costume changes...
...James Boswell's description of the philosophe is a perfect fit for Lenny: "He had bold flights...
...What the hell...
...That the stage version of Candide ran only 73 performances was to some extent the fault of the audience rather than the creative team, most of whose talents ran ahead of their time...
...But his touch was light...
...But scenes like these are continually nullified by such incidents as the auto-da-f...
...Pangloss (Jim Dale...
...As a chanteuse the young veteran of the Metropolitan Opera does well enough, particularly with the demanding "Glitter and Be Gay," a number in which the soprano must laugh, descend to a purr and rise to operatic heights all within the space of two bars...
...He remains pure in heart and mind despite what he sees and whom he meets...
...she has timing, wit and movement...
...The composer was in his mid-3 0s when he wrote these songs, and at the peak of his powers...
...What Voltaire had done to 18th-century France, Bernstein and his collaborators attempted to do to grand opera, sending up Donizetti, Verdi and even the sainted Mozart...
...From then on, life becomes a litany of catastrophes...
...Candide (Jason Danieley) has implicit faith in the words of his benign and famous tutor, Dr...
...He had humor...
...a priest, a wealthy Jewish merchant and a judge (all overplayed by Arte Johnson...
...As it turned out, the 1956 Broadway production proved creditable at worst, and brilliant at best...
...The results were mixed: The cast again left something to be desired, and the production seemed too grandiose for Voltaire's miniature...
...When questioned, Arouet affected a "qui, moil" attitude, denying that he had anything to do with the book...
...Lawrence, the star of Catskills on Broadway several seasons ago, is essentially a Borscht Belt comedian whose stand-up routines were a Mountain staple for more than 30 years...
...Either the investigators bought his story or pretended to, and let the man alone...
...I Am So Easily Assimilated" cannily suggests Russian, Yiddish and Spanish folk dances...
...Prince's hands are as heavy as counterweights...
...Johnson is remembered principally as the Dirty Old Man and the German Soldier in the TV program Laugh In...
...Those who listen closely to the song of rediscovery ("Cunégonde, is it you...
...As the Doctor sees it, "It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are...
...To make a musical from the Voltaireian amalgam of outrage and acid seemed an absurd idea in the early 1950s, when it was announced that Lillian Hellman would write the book, Leonard Bernstein would compose the music, and Richard Wilbur and John LaTouche would provide the lyrics...
...Attacking the powerful was his vocation...
...Bearing that in mind, the writers interpolated a line from that show: At one point Dale looks down at the diminutive actor and mutters "Verry interesting," Johnson's TV signature...
...Another laborious interlude, with Cunégonde's brother (Brent Barrett) in drag, is strictly for the wink-and-nudge crowd...
...Or, for that matter, support to support her...
...What she does not have is a script to support her...
...The plot seems more practical on the page than on the stage...
...Actually it was a grinning critique of the 18th century's excesses and cruelties, as well as a put-down of those contemporary philosophers who believed in the gospel of sweetness and light...
...Candide and his virginal young girlfriend Cunégonde (Harolyn Blackwell) are separated when war sunders the peaceful little country of Westphalia...
...In the course of five minutes it manages a gross mockery of Christianity, Judaism and good taste in general...
...Decades later, after more incidents than songs, he and his beloved—who has long since descended from soiled village girl to pampered courtesan to impoverished whore—are reunited...
...Every reader knew that the Frenchman had no better occupation...
...Bernstein's overture went on to become part of the symphonic repertory, and the original-cast LP, never transferred to CD, became a rare collector's item...
...No such event occurs in the book, nor was it in the original production...
...You were shot andbayoneted too...
...Yet that version is modesty itself compared to the latest edition of Candide at the Gershwin Theater, directed with vast and thoughtless energy by Prince...
...But her acting never rises above the elemental...
...The nation's finest cabaret singer, Barbara Cook, was the original Cunégonde, and Blackwell cannot hope to erase her memory...
...No matter how beleaguered, the protagonist will have none of their palaver...
...Would that Prince had heeded it...
...gazing at the classicists, he could mock one minute and genuflect the next...
...Some 10 years later he brought another version to the stage of the New York City Opera...
...True, Voltaire had little use for Christianity, and he was surprisingly anti-Semitic...
...The razzie dazzles all right, but the writers' intentions are lost in a chaos of special effects...
...and a ribald old lady (Andrea Martin) whose sole claim to distinction is that she has only one buttock...
...The belief that this is the best of all possible worlds is to be sorely tried in the years ahead...
...Andrea Martin is, once more, a comedienne par excellence...
Vol. 80 • May 1997 • No. 8
