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A tale of two Candides, plus American Classics’ Peggy-Ann
BY LLOYD SCHWARTZ
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Candide is a hard one. Leonard Bernstein’s satirical operetta, with a book by no less a literary personage than Lillian Hellman, and lyrics by poet Richard Wilbur, avant-garde writer John Latouche, Hellman, and Bernstein himself (Dorothy Parker is credited with making a contribution), ran for a mere 73 performances on Broadway in 1956. It survives because Columbia Records’ Goddard Lieberson (father of composer Peter Lieberson) produced an original-cast album, and no subsequent incarnation — not even the composer’s own version — has come near to recapturing that one’s effervescent spirit. (I wish I’d been present at Candide’s very first public airing, at MIT, with Hellman reading her script and drama critic/music professor Caldwell Titcomb playing the piano and singing.) One reason Candide is riddled with difficulties is that Hellman was bitterly unhappy with her experience, so disappointed in her own contribution that she forbade her executors ever to allow her script to be performed. Later versions have mainly been some form of playwright Hugh Wheeler’s reduction of Voltaire’s moral fable, with some new lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and others, often dealt out to different characters and placed in different situations from what were originally intended (music written for the noblewoman Cunegonde is here sung by her servant Paquette; benign Candide sings a song written for an impatient grandee; Paris music is moved to Lisbon; Venice music travels to Constantinople; Hellman’s touching lyric for "El Dorado" becomes a blander hymn to "the New World"). Instead of a play, Wheeler’s Candide is a kind of pageant, narrated by "Voltaire," with the same actor also playing Voltaire’s cockeyed optimist, Dr. Pangloss. But Bernstein’s scintillating and rangy score cries out for a strong play to hold it together, not a series of repetitious episodes. By the second act, even the best productions peter out. There’s little suspense, and the level of wit is often sub-basement — how many jokes can you make out of an old lady’s missing buttock? Still, at the end of October, giving the American premiere of the Royal National Theatre version, the gifted students of the Boston Conservatory, the brilliant staging by Neil Donohoe (chair of BC’s theater division) and choreography of Michelle Chassé, the incisive conducting by Reuben R. Reynolds III, and the imaginative designs by Peter Waldron (sets) and Stacey Stephens (costumes) produced what was probably as close as we’ll ever get to a Candide that works. Not perfect, this version incorporates the most material from Voltaire, so there are too many characters, and the second act goes off on too many tangents. But this phenomenal team gave all three and a half hours of it a joyous vitality. I believed in the characters and cared about their plights. There was an ideal Candide in Austin Lesch — boyishly handsome, with a creamy Broadway tenor voice projecting a touchingly sincere naïveté. When he was torn away from his beloved Cunegonde, I ached for him. Soprano Kalynn Dodge was probably not fully ready to sing Cunegonde’s fiendishly difficult aria, "Glitter and Be Gay," and at the opening, she dropped some of its most famous lines, but she belted the big high notes, and her self-centeredness was very amusing. Mezzo-soprano Alysha Umphress was a big hit as the mysterious Old Woman with half a rear end missing. She’s a born comedienne — part Ethel Merman, part Carol Burnett, yet utterly individual — and she was the best actor in the cast, as effective in her long spoken recitation of her years of suffering as in her singing. Excellent also were Billy Piscopo as the self-infatuated Maximilian, Amy Jackson as the all-too-eager-to-please Paquette (who could do a split!), and Josh Grisetti as both the ironic Voltaire and the indomitably short-sighted Pangloss. Everyone in the cast, including the large chorus, could both sing and dance. Above all, director Donohoe had a real idea about the production — one that was actually inspired by the music. Since a kind of circus theme runs through the score (it’s especially apparent between the verses of the song "What’s the Use?"), Donohoe and choreographer Chassé made you see that for these characters the world itself is a three-ring-circus, that staying alive is a high-wire act. Voltaire was the ringmaster, surrounded by kootch dancers, tumblers, a snake charmer, a midget, a fat lady (in wonderful fat-lady padding), a tattoo’d lady, a lion tamer. Cunegonde was a tight-rope walker. The stage throbbed with crimson and vermilion. And something was always happening. Two celebrated antecedents of this idea of a central, reverberating metaphor are the insane asylum in Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade and the demolished theater in Hal Prince’s production of Sondheim’s Follies. Donohoe’s inventive shticks all grew out of this central vision, so even if one fizzled, it still meant something. That was one of the failures of Opera Boston’s Candide last weekend. There were no ideas at all, just shticks and jokes (the Old Lady stabbed by a thorn when she puts a rose between her teeth). This was the New York City Opera version, which neither Bernstein nor Hellman liked (she was furious with Bernstein for allowing "a hack like Wheeler to fool around with my work"). It’s shorter than the Royal National Theatre version but seems longer. The opening performance was clearly under-rehearsed and tentative. Both musical and dramatic cues were painfully slow on the uptake. The last scene, nearly 15 minutes of ponderous talk before the stirring "Make Our Garden Grow" chorale, was one of the deadest spans of stage time I can remember. The show must surely have tightened up in its remaining two performances, but even flawless pacing couldn’t make Bill Fabris’s staging more pointed. His was the weakest contribution to this company’s Massenet opera Le jongleur de Notre-Dame last year (I called his staging "primitive"). He’s the long-time director of the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, but Bernstein isn’t G&S. He seemed more interested in mugging than in instilling his players with a convincing sense of character, so it was hard to get interested in anything they did. This is a shame, because Opera Boston assembled an excellent, even distinguished ensemble of local singers (with two imports) and players. Musical director Gil Rose began with an elegantly played Overture, but he seemed to lose steam as the evening wore on, mired perhaps in the increasingly retarded pace of the spoken dialogue. As Voltaire/Pangloss, baritone Sanford Sylvan, in resonant voice, proved what a good sport he was to go along with the broad staging and the unflattering costumes (in the last scene, he looked like the Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland). His best moment was Dr. Pangloss’s rationalization for syphilis, "Dear Boy." Soprano Cara Johnston seems to have at least as much experience understudying leading roles as playing them. Her voice nailed the coloratura fireworks in "Glitter and Be Gay," but can you imagine Barbara Cook, the original Cunegonde, twirling a rope of pearls like a hula hoop around her neck? (At least she got a laugh.) As Candide, tenor James Schaffner had a small, sweet voice but seemed awfully pleased with himself as a model of modesty (why the English accent?); sometimes it was hard to tell him apart from Aaron Engebreth’s conceited Maximilian. Emily Browder (Paquette) seemed unembarrassed about having to jerk off her feather duster (good taste, as a friend is fond of saying, is timeless). Lovely and lively Lynn Torgove was cast against type as the deformed Old Woman, but even this accomplished singer/actress/director failed to create a believable or sympathetic character. Her limp, her thick Polish/Yiddish accent (I’m sure I heard her exclaim "Oy caramba!"), and her overemphatic comic delivery were especially hurt by the pervasive broadness of style. There was good support from Engebreth, tenor Alan Schneider (whose leering Governor of Cartagena was one of the more restrained and best-sung performances), David M. Cushing (the Grand Inquisitor), and Donald Wilkinson (both a Jew and a Pasha). "Lavishly staged," the press release said, but David Fortuna’s set — a double staircase leading up to a small balcony, with a blank backdrop and some elements dropped in (a ship, a wheel of fortune, Japanese lanterns) — seemed mere economizing. The audience seemed to want to like what it was experiencing, but the standing ovation numbered, by my count, only six persons. One quality that’s made Opera Boston and its antecedent, Boston Academy of Music, a worthy rival to Boston Lyric Opera has been the inventiveness of its best productions. Candide in any form has major built-in problems. But the main one here was the absence of the imagination and taste needed to overcome the basic obstacles. IMAGINATION HAS ALWAYS BEEN at work in American Classics’ annual concert revivals of neglected or forgotten musical comedies like Dietz & Schwartz’s revue The Band Wagon (1931) and Irving Berlin’s second show, Stop! Look! Listen! (1915). This year, it was Rodgers & Hart’s 1926 "play with music," Peggy-Ann, a Cinderella story about the dreams of a boarding-house owner’s frustrated daughter that’s based on yet an earlier musical, Tillie’s Nightmare. Its extended dream sequences anticipate by 15 years the musical exploration of the subconscious by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin in Lady in the Dark. The original book, by Herbert Fields, might not survive a full-scale production, but David Frieze’s animated "semi-staging" and Jennifer Farrell-Engebretson’s uncliché’d dances were perfect for Longy School of Music’s intimate Pickman Hall. The founding and guiding spirits of American Classics are Bradford Conner and Benjamin Sears. Conner and that prodigious one-woman orchestra, pianist Margaret Ulmer, did the exuberant arrangements. The company of skillful regulars and newcomers (some still only semi-skillful, but all appealing) included Ida Zecco, Bob Jolly, Brent Reno, Reba Lawless, Peter A. Carey, super-glamorous La’Tarsha Long, Sears and Conner themselves, and Mary Ann Lanier, another founding member, in the title role. I found even the awful jokes fun (an underwear clerk telling a customer, "This is the largest one we have in that size"; the heroine scolding her boyfriend, "I hate you, practically"). Some of Rodgers’s captivating tunes are startlingly syncopated, and the Gordian knots of internal rhymes in Hart’s witty lyrics are priceless ("In each scenario/You can depend on the end/Where the lovers agree./Where’s that Lothario?/Where does he roam, with his dome/Vaselined as can be?"). Peggy-Ann’s best songs are not quite standards, but people left humming the poignant "Where’s That Rainbow?", "A Tree in the Park," and the worldly-wise "A Little Birdie Told Me So" ("Don’t pity mother Eve, her weakness was detestable,/And soon she learned forbidden fruit was indigestible!"). That’s entertainment!
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