Fun-House Voltaire

By LANCE MORROW

CANDIDE A Musical

The audience sitting down for this Candide is liable to be a bit stunned by its surroundings. The entire inside of the respectable Broadway Theater has been gutted and rebuilt along the lines of an amusement park fun house--ten different playing areas scattered throughout, with running ramps, movable drawbridges, balconies. In the midst of the chaos, spectators are arrayed in bleachers or on stools in the pit. Such environmental gimmickry can be hazardous.

Here, it seems the best of all possible worlds for Candide.

This bright circus of a production began this winter at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and it is even better on Broadway. Lillian Hellman's book for the 1956 Broadway production, which had a troubled history, was scrapped in favor of a faster and frothier new version by Hugh Wheeler, with Stephen Sondheim contributing a few new lyrics to the originals by Poet Richard Wilbur. What remains the same, of course, is Leonard Bernstein's restless, delightful score, one of the best ever written for the musical stage. It has a sort of light intellectual jump to it, like the skittering of ideas through an exceptionally agile and civilized mind.

Voltaire's tale of innocence and catastrophe prances through the theater as if it were the wide, exuberantly evil world itself. Mark Baker's puppylike Candide and his beloved Cunegonde (Maureen Brennan) begin in the radiant sweetness of their Westphalia, instructed of course in Dr. Pangloss's invincible doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds. What follows in Voltaire's gleeful vision is a string of unmitigated but somehow good-natured disasters--banishment, war, scourging, mass slaughter, piracy, the Spanish Inquisition, slavery, concubinage--until at last the wanderers come to El Dorado. Leading pink sheep laden with glimmering ingots, Candide and Cunegonde arrive with their innocence reasonably intact, although such setbacks as her rape by a regiment of Bulgarian soldiers have left Cunegonde with a somewhat supple interpretation of purity.

Presiding over the action is Lewis Stadlen, who plays the geriatric Voltaire, the buoyant Pangloss and assorted villains. The set, which might have been a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and the sculptor Jean Tinguely, turns in its own virtuoso performance. It throws down bridges between continents, cascades green streamers down to simulate jungle, and rocks like a storm-battered ship. Despite such assaults, the audience is treated with a kind of 18th century courtesy and just the right note of complicity. If there could be a lovelier Candide than this, it is difficult to imagine.

Lance Morrow

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