The show opened in Boston for three weeks of tryouts.  The dress rehearsal overran catastrophically and the reviewers were asked to come back later in the week.  "We have a little trouble," Tony Guthrie [the director] told the charity benefit audience in his disarming way, "but we're going to get this thing on tonight."  Variety's account, when it came, began promisingly: "It's a spectacular, opulent and racy musical, verging on operetta.  It's replete with eye-filling costumes, lavish settings, a big cast and fine musical score."  Then came the warning: "A major hurdle to popular acceptance of the show is the somewhat esoteric nature of its satire (and the public's unfamiliarity with the Voltaire original).  The musical also needs severe cutting, especially in the second act."

Many other Boston reviewers were enthusiastic about Candide, but the book was criticized for being slow and heavy and hard to follow.  Behind the scenes the mood was close to panic.  When [associate producer] Lester Osterman came up from New York to see a performance, he arrived late, in time to catch only the last fifteen minutes: "I was almost knocked down by the people trying to get out of the theater," he told a crisis meeting next morning.  Bernstein and Hellman pruned to clarify the show and wrote extra material to provide time for costume changes.  An especially hectic period began when it was decided that a new number was needed to brighten up the start of the scene in the Venice casino.  Script conferences, Richard Wilbur remembers, took place in the men's room at the theater.  "Let's do a vulgar rousing number," Bernstein said.  He wanted the kind of song that might be sung on the way to a college football game — but with echoes of "Carnival in Venice".  The result was "What's the Use?".  Bernstein improvised a refrain there and then, after which he and Wilbur went back to their separate hotels; every hour or so Wilbur would phone through another verse or a refinement to an existing idea.  Hershy Kay came up from New York the same day to do the orchestrations, and that evening the number was part of the show.

The other day in Boston, a reporter called on Miss Hellman and Mr. Bernstein in their hotel suites to find out how things were coming along.  Each suite was in considerable disarray, as though many protracted and soul-searching conferences had been taking place all day.  The main difference between the suites was that Miss Hellman's had freshly typewritten manuscript pages lying around and Mr. Bernstein's had sheets of partly completed music.

Both writers had the distracted, absent-minded air common to authors and composers as the deadline approaches.  Both were smoking at a furious rate.  Both had been getting too little sleep.

"The Lisbon scene is not clear and needs rewriting," Miss Hellman said by way of greeting the reporter.

"The gavotte at the end of Venice is a mess," said Mr. Bernstein.  "It needs to be fixed."

"It seems to me I've been working on Candide all my life," said Miss Hellman.  "Occasionally I fear I'll end up in an institution looking like a bust of Voltaire and demanding that the attendants address me as Voltaire."

Voltaire was a brave, wise and unscrupulous man who was born in Paris in 1694 and died there in 1778 after living in exile much of the time.  He took the hide off so many people in his book, including drama critics whom he compared to eunuchs, that there was quite a bit of jubilation when he died.  Miss Hellman has not included the polemic against the critics in the play.

"Three years ago I was reading Candide in bed," she said.  "I was laughing and having such fun with it.  I had read it first when I was very young and I guess I read it every five or six years from that time on.  To me it was a great book, full of laughter, wisdom, comment, satire and bite.  I thought of it as an attack on all rigid thinking, on all isms.  I decided that night I'd like to do something with it."

Mr. Bernstein had often told Miss Hellman he wanted to do a musical with her.  After the fun-in-bed session she cabled him in Milan, where he was conducting at La Scala, and said:

"How about Candide?  I'm excited.  Are you?"

He cabled back that he was excited, too, and that started the collaboration.  They've worked on the show off and on for two and a half years. . . .

When Candide opened in New York at the Martin Beck Theatre, on Saturday, December 1, 1956, the critics saw a production from which probably too much had been cut.  Guthrie lacked the experience to do his own show-doctoring and nobody was in command of the creative talent in the way that George Abbott had been for Bernstein's two previous musicals.  Backstage there was a sense of disappointment.  Yet the work was received with acclamation in many quarters.

Since Voltaire was a brilliant writer, it is only right that his Candide should turn out to be a brilliant musical satire.  Voltaire's cynical acceptance of war, greed, treachery, venery, snobbishness, and mendacity as staples of civilization provokes no disbelief in the middle of the twentieth century. . . . Pooling their talents, Lillian Hellman, the literary lady, and Leonard Bernstein, the music man, have composed an admirable version of Voltaire's philosophical tale. . . . Barbara Cook is a lustrous singer, particularly in Mr. Bernstein's own version of how a jewel song should be written ["Glitter and Be Gay"].  And her acting portrayal of a lyrical maiden who quickly learns how to connive with the world is sketched with skill, spirit, and humor.
- Brooks Atkinson, New York Times

To get the big news out in a hurry, Leonard Bernstein's music is lush, lovely, and electric.  When it isn't voluptuous as velvet, it is as frostily pretty as a diamond bell.  It is easily the best score Mr. Bernstein has written for the theatre.  To go a step further, it is one of the most attractive scores anyone has written for the theatre.  . . . Miss Cook tears down the house with a coloratura attack on a song called "Glitter and Be Gay", lustily achieving the trill beyond the trill beyond the trill.
- Tom Donnelly, World Telegram & Sun

Three of the most talented people our theatre possesses — Lillian Hellman, Leonard Bernstein, Tyrone Guthrie — have joined hands to transform Voltaire's Candide into a really spectacular disaster.  Who is mostly responsible for the great ghostly wreck that sails like a Flying Dutchman across the fogbound stage of the Martin Beck?  That would be hard to say, the honors are so evenly distributed.  . . . Satire, as I understand it, is a matter of humor — partly of good humor, partly of snappish wit.  Miss Hellman's attack on it is academic, blunt, and bareface.  . . . Irony is thumped out with a crushing hand, nobility is underscored by bewildering tears (Max Adrian as Dr. Pangloss, did really seem to be crying onstage at the opening of Saturday night, for reasons which shall forever remain his secret).  Nowhere in all the garlanded banquetry, the wild Parisian waltzing, the South American veranda-lolling, the frenzied double-hanging that winds up a Portuguese bacchanal are we permitted to take a moment's shrewd delight in the sly thrust, the mockery that amuses even as it kills, the tell-tale truth that grins and gleams behind a sombre mask.  . . . Once the air has cleared a bit, I imagine Mr. Bernstein will come off best, if there is a best to be salvaged from this singularly ill-conceived venture.  For a great part of the evening Mr. Bernstein is composing trilling little pastiches that are surely meant as wry comments on music, if not manners.  . . . Pessimism is the order of the evening.
- Walter Kerr, New York Herald Tribune

Sixty seconds after conductor Samuel Krachmalnick brought down his baton for the overture, one sensed that here was going to be an evening of uncommon quality.  It developed into an artistic triumph — the best light opera, I think, since Richard Strauss wrote Der Rosenkavalier in 1911.  It is a great contribution to the richness of the American musical comedy stage.  Many artists of many skills have had a hand in fashioning Candide, but it is Bernstein's profoundly sophisticated and witty score which puts it in a class by itself on Broadway.  Bernstein has put an enormous amount of music, and a great variety of it, into his score.  The comic highlight is his witty burlesque of a coloratura aria in which Miss Cook exults, "Glitter and Be Gay".  There are trios, quartets, waltzes, ballads, a wonderful tango, hornpipes, and many other exciting offerings.  Generally speaking, the music achieves an 18th-century effect with remarkably modern methods.  It is a work of genius.  Now all I can hope is that Broadway, which is unpredictable and which does not always like to be jogged out of its routine, will cherish it as it should be cherished.
- John Chapman, New York Daily News

Candide is a distinguished work.  . . . It towers head and shoulders above most of the song-and-dancers you'll get this season or any other season.
- Robert Coleman New York Daily Mirror

But a few bad reviews could not on their own kill a show as good as Candide.  The truth seems to be that there were not enough theater-goers of sophisticated taste in New York to support the show past a couple of months.  Candide suffered the same fate as Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock in 1948 and Regina in 1949, and Menotti's The Saint of Bleecker Street in 1955.  Four of the seven New York daily critics gave Candide rave reviews, yet receipts were dipping badly within a month.  The reason, [New York Daily News critic] John Chapman suggested, was that "it was O.P.E.R.A."  While he loved the show personally, Chapman admitted that there was also the Broadway view that "Candide is a great big bore because it does not have a romantic plot according to Broadway standards, and it does not have any songs in it which can be delivered by disk jockeys or hung on the appallingly dispiriting record racks of juke boxes in saloons and dining-car hash-houses."

When attendance fell off, Bernstein and his partners took a 50 percent cut in royalty payments.  Letters for and against Candide appeared every Sunday in the correspondence columns of the Times.  After a provisional closing was announced in mid-January, box office bookings rose dramatically, and the show grossed over forty-four thousand dollars in each of its last two weeks, double the previous fortnight's take.  By the time Ethel Reiner closed Candide, on February 2, it was beginning to sell well.  [Production designer] Olvier Smith believes it was an unnecessary failure, that Mrs. Reiner "arbitrarily closed it" because she was mad at Lillian Hellman.  The two women had a tremendous row at his house, Smith recalled; "Hellman could be very cruel, screaming and yelling at her, and Mrs. Reiner had just had it and said 'the heck with it.'"

All that remains of the original show is a lively cast recording, produced by Goddard Lieberson for Columbia.  Conducted by the show's devoted musical director, Samuel Krachmalnick, it became a collectors' item on both sides of the Atlantic. 

On October 7, 1956, on the highly viewed Omnibus television program, Leonard Bernstein spoke at length about the evolution of the American musical since the creation in 1855 of The Black Crook, considered the first truly indigenous production ever staged in this country.  The musical, he said, was "a unique and peculiarly American institution," midway between opera and the more popular variety shows.

The show had run for only seventy-three performances at a cost of $340,000.  Bernstein earned less than $10,000 for a task that had been in progress for three years.  (Voltaire had written his novella in only three weeks.)

In their postmortems the participants blamed themselves as well as others.  [See the excerpt from Tyrone Guthrie's biography below]  Bernstein is reported to have complained that Richard Wilbur "shuts himself off in a phone booth and talks to God!"  Wilbur remembers that Bernstein "thought rather highly of himself as a writer."  On one occasion Wilbur was so exasperated by the way Bernstein came up with his own version for a lyric that he would have quit had he not been strapped for cash.  Instead, he made a joke of it; when he left Martha's Vineyard briefly in the summer of 1956 he asked Hellman to protect his interests: "If you catch Lenny re-writing my lyrics, clip his piano wires."

As Richard Wilbur saw it, "There was no single villain.  Lillian Hellman doesn't really like musicals.  Lenny's music got more and more pretentious and smashy — the audience forgot what was happening to the characters.  Lillian's book got to be mere connective tissue."  Hellman called Candide her "most unpleasant experience in the theater."  Oliver Smith remembers she fought tooth and nail with Guthrie over his cuts, denouncing him at one rehearsal.  "You've sold out," she screamed: "You're just a whore."  Smith, for one, disagrees with the often-repeated claim that Candide suffered because there were too many talents at work.  Bernstein was working with equally distinguished collaborators on West Side Story.

From the start the great risk was that the whole thing would seem wildly pretentious.  And that is just what it did seem.  Only Bernstein's mercurial, allusive score emerged with credit.  For my part I do not at all regret the skirmish.  It was an artistic and financial disaster from which I learned almost nothing about anything.  But it was fun to be closely associated with a group so brilliantly and variously talented.

Bernstein's facility and virtuosity are so dazzling that you are almost blinded, and fail to see the patient workmanship, the grinding application to duty which produces the gloss.  This may not be an original or creative genius, but, if I ever have seen it, the stuff of genius is here.

Hellman fought this battle with one hand tied behind her back.  We had all agreed that when necessity demanded we would choose singers to do justice to the score, rather than actors who could handle the text but for whom the score must be reduced.  Consequently, line after line, situation after situation, fell flat on its face because — no blame to them — singers were asked to do something for which they had no gift nor experience nor understanding.  Miss Hellman stooped fatally to conquer.  None of her good qualities as a writer showed to advantage.  This was no medium for hard-hitting argument, shrewd humorous characterization, the slow revelation of true values and the exposure of false ones.

I wonder if it was an unconscious reaction to the diamond quality of Bernstein's brilliance?  She and I, and an eminent squad of technical collaborators all seemed to lose whatever share of lightness and gaiety and dash we might possibly have been able to contribute.  My direction skipped along with the effortless grace of a freight train heavy-laden on a steep gradient.  As a result even the score was thrown out of key.  Rossini and Cole Porter seemed to have been rearranging Götterdämmerung.

In 1956 both musically and thematically, Candide seemed to be without precedent.  At first it was simply billed as a musical, but when that designation seemed to mislead the audiences the billing was changed to 'comic operetta'.  The switch signaled a debate among the collaborators about what kind of musical they wanted to present: in their uncoordinated production they seemed to be conducting their internal dissensions in public.  Hellman's book and Guthrie's direction notably failed to serve Bernstein's vibrant and witty score.  Indeed Bernstein was the only collaborator who apparently understood the show's source, Voltaire's satire.  . . .  Bernstein's musical ideas, his conflations of classical and popular idioms, have a verve that evokes the spirit of Voltaire.  Parodies of a trilling operatic style and of vocal overembellishment, symphonic orchestrations, and voluptuous melodies combine with driving rhythms in a score that crosses concert-hall decorum with Broadway showmanship. . . .

Bernstein's score is above reproach, and the lyrics, whether by Latouche, Wilbur, Sondheim, Bernstein, or anyone else, are superb.  The blame for the failure of the original has been placed squarely on Hellman's shoulders.  But, when read today, Hellman's book, with its thinly veiled allusions to contemporary issues, is a respectable job and has many funny lines, especially for the Old Lady.  . . . The real problem with Hellman's book is that Voltaire's novel is simply unsuited to stage adaptation: it's a picaresque series of adventures with no real plot which repeats the same philosophical points again and again.  There is nothing dramatic about it, and Candide, Cunegonde, and the others were not meant to be "real" people.  There is no way to become involved in the plight of the characters, and musicals which prevent such audience identification rarely succeed.  If Hellman's book fails to solve these built-in problems, there is really nothing else wrong with it, and it serves as a good setting for what was obviously meant to be the show's centerpiece, the score.

Hugh Wheeler's book was in no way an improvement; in fact, it's less funny, substituting camp and leers for wit.  It worked well with Prince's informal, intermissionless, and giddy staging on Broadway but has become a liability in opera-house versions.  It is unfortunate that Hellman's book is no longer available to potential producers of Candide, who must make do with Wheeler's silly, arch script or some revision thereof.  The original production has been unjustly maligned as a misfire when it was actually superior to what passes for Candide in theatres and opera houses these days.