NOBODY knows how to classify Bernstein’s show because it can be performed in so many ways. Unlike West Side Story your toes don’t curl when opera singers get into it. Actually Candide is an interesting illustration of the law, if it exists, of increasing returns: the more operatic the performance — with theatrical ambition and vision as well as voices — the bigger the payoff.
That’s because Candide possesses the secret of the theatrical philosopher’s stone: how to make you laugh and then hit you with a sucker-punch of heartbreak. Done as a musical it will wring a sentimental Broadway tear; cranking up its operatic potential can turn it into something that goes much deeper into the exhilaration and horror of living.
This concert performance went pretty much for the Broadway approach, occasionally bordering on something else. Rumon Gamba and the BBC Concert Orchestra gave everything to a big and brash performance of the overture, a fairground-sideshow slugging match between Rossini and Prokofiev. Then Sir Thomas Allen launched into John Wells’s sardonic narration.
Now Sir Tom is a treasure but this isn’t really his job and it took him a while to get in character. The same went for some tentative singers: a mix of voices, some from opera and some from theatre but all singing in Broadway mode into tinny mikes. Why, I’m not sure: I reckon Allen and most of the others can fill the Festival Hall. In any case, this was an advertisement for the emotional power of the unmiked voice, if only by its absence; odd to hear the coloratura of Glitter and be Gay half-voiced through this denaturing system (albeit acrobatically done by Carla Huhtanen).
Then a whirlwind hit the stage in the form of Kim Criswell, shortly to appear in ENO’s On the Town, and bringing a sackful of Times Square sass and stagecraft with her as the Old Lady from Rovno Gubernya, “easily assimilated” into whatever hellhole Voltaire and Bernstein throw her.
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Suddenly words and drama began to matter and the ungentle satire of this work to take hold. Optimism isn’t some quaint 18th-century philosophy but the guiding cant of the world, half-Oceania, half-Toytown, that is our beloved “axis of good”.
The thing slipped gleefully on towards its end, and fresh-faced Candide Michael Slattery’s moment of disillusion and the ensemble finale Make our Garden Grow, a wonderful expression of human staunchness in adversity, were suitably moving and inspiriting. The orchestra had a brassy riot with Bernstein’s brilliantly colourful pastiche and musical travelogue. The crowd loved it, and so, eventually, did I.