Candide

Synopsis

A naive young man believes that 'all is for the best' even when confronted by evil. Originally performed in 1956, additional songs added in 1974. Candide explores a world that is dominated by violence, greed, war, hatred and a series of catastrophic events seemingly unmitigated by goodness, truth, beauty or God.

Our Review:

26 June 2008

Leonard Bernstein’s comic operetta Candide is the most mucked about with piece of theatre in the world, and there is nothing one can do except shrug one’s shoulders. As Voltaire’s philosopher Pangloss never tires of remarking, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

The trouble is that the most wonderful score – music by Bernstein, lyrics by the poet Richard Wilbur, my favourite translator of Moliere - written in 1956, has a hopeless book, despite input over the years from Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Hugh Wheeler, Stephen Sondheim, John Wells, John Caird, Trevor Nunn, Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

Now ENO director Robert Carsen and his dramaturg Ian Burton have gone for broke and set the show in the modern America of the McCarthy witch-hunts, the Ku Klux Clan, JFK’s Camelot and the moon landings, with the innocent adventurer Candide’s deceitful inamorata, Cunegonde, played unequivocally by [Anna Christy...

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Jim Grover - 15 July 2008:

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