Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set to tunes from the West Side Story guy: what’s not to like? And what can be so wrong with its twinkle-toed score that the combined rewriting efforts (and this is not remotely the full list) of Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker and Stephen Sondheim have all failed to make it work as theatre? For my money it’s the ending. Voltaire coolly pricks his own bubble and tells us to get on with tending our gardens. Bernstein, the all-American idealist, just can’t, and he kills the whole thing dead with ‘Make Our Garden Grow’, a Hallmark moral drenched in gooey musical uplift. Unless you can solve that, Candide simply can’t be fixed.
If ENO got their paws on a hit as bankable as this they’d revive it every other season for the foreseeable future
But Welsh National Opera’s new production got astonishingly close.
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