The Definitive Candide?

Every composer seems to have his "show that will not die." Jerry Herman has Mack and Mabel. Stephen Sondheim has Merrily We Roll Along. And Leonard Bernstein had Candide. And they all have one thing in common: they have terrific scores, but troublesome books, at least in their original incarnations.

That is, until director Hal Prince and librettist Hugh Wheeler took a crack at Candide in 1974 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The production jettisoned the ponderous and pretentious original book for a fast-and-loose interpretation that was far more true to the spirit of the original Voltaire classic. The cast album for this Candide recently came out on CD, which is what got me thinking about the topic in the first place.

The BAM version caught on, and literally moved to Broadway: the Broadway Theater, in fact, one of the seven or so Broadway houses that are actually on Broadway. (I count the Minskoff, the Marquis, the Palace, the Gershwin, the Circle in the Square, the Winter Garden, and the Broadway. Am I missing any?) The production played for two years, and many thought this version to be the definitive Candide.

But that hasn't stopped people from trying to improve the show. Before he died, Bernstein himself oversaw numerous additional attempts to "perfect" the show, including a recording in 1989 that he labeled the "final" version. A few years back, the folks at the Boston Conservatory performed the latest version of Leonard Bernstein's Candide, one concocted by director John (Les Miserables) Caird.

Here's the main problem with all these new versions: they try to do the whole damn score, every little number ever written, no matter how tangential or tedious, and it slows the production down to a snail's crawl. The BoCo production was admirable and swell to look at, but it felt like it lasted a friggin' week. The Caird version adds characters, scenes, and plot-lines in addition to every damn song imaginable, and the result is overwrought and downright soporific.

The Hal Prince version, however, is zippy and punchy, and tons of fun. The performances are spot-on, particularly those by Mark Baker (Candide), Maureen Brennan (Cunegonde), and Lewis J. Stadlen (Dr. Pangloss). There's very little dead weight in this show, which is performed in its entirety on the new 2-CD set. Each musical number has a purpose, and performs it admirably, and the true purpose of Voltaire's satiric piece comes through in a way that none of the other versions even approximates.