★★★★☆
It was rewritten eight times, and still doesn’t convince. The casual racism makes you squirm. The plot runs out an hour before the show ends. Voltaire’s satire, so rapier-sharp on the page, somehow transmutes into a lumbering travelogue on stage. And even the score, composed by a man about to write Broadway’s greatest musical, isn’t consistently inspired after its sizzling overture.
So if you want to stage Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 operetta Candide, you had better throw everything you have at it. And that’s what the director James Bonas does with this hyperactive Welsh National Opera production. I felt exhausted just watching it.
The action depicts the gradual disillusionment of the naively optimistic Candide — a likeable and strongly sung performance by Ed Lyon — as he is beset by natural disasters and human venality. It takes place in front of a curtain of tiny chains onto which the video designer Grégoire Pont projects elaborate real-time animations — a non-stop kaleidoscope of sketched townscapes, animals, limousine rides, forests, even entire battles, interacting virtuosically with the live performers, who often seem suspended in midair.
To add to the spectacle, WNO’s excellent chorus is complemented by a dance troupe executing Ewan Jones’s Broadway-style choreography with parodistic wit. One slinky number even seems to send up Sam Smith’s latest camp videos.
Minus points? Everything is amplified, sometimes to oppressive levels — even the orchestra, seated at the back of the stage with the conductor Karen Kamensek. Indeed, the instrumental balances sound unnatural at times, especially in the famous overture.
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And to tighten up the storytelling, much is entrusted to a narrator, Gillian Bevan, who doubles as a gender-changed Dr Pangloss. That’s asking a lot, and Bevan doesn’t always get the ironic tone right — though an epoch-hopping script that drops in “witty” allusions to everything from the Holocaust to “Milton Keynes’s car park” doesn’t help.
That said, there are compelling individual performances. Although her hit number, Glitter and Be Gay, was stridently delivered, Claudia Boyle did hit its stratospheric high notes cleanly and shone visually as the perpetually abused Cunégonde (this is the sort of 1950s show in which women cheerfully accept that multiple rape is just part of life’s rich tapestry). Madeleine Shaw is excellent as the Old Lady who has somehow had a single buttock devoured by cannibals. And a host of minor parts are characterised with cartoonish glee. Being toured extensively from Brecon to Truro, the show will entertain many without convincing anyone that Candide is a masterpiece.
To June 24, then touring, wno.org.uk
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