Let's put it this way: If you had a wildly successful and highly unusual show galloping along to the tune of ecstatic reviews and sold-out houses and no end in sight, would you choose to close down, put everything in cold storage and then announce plans to re-open, six weeks later, in a completely different place, promising all the while that nothing, not a splinter or stitch of your show's unique staging, would be permitted to suffer or be changed in the slightest?  Whew!

The producers of Candide — the Chelsea Theater Center of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Broadway's Harold Prince — have made exactly that promise to all the people who, they hope, intend to pour into the Broadway Theater, starting March 5, for a look at the theatrical miracle that grew and flourished in Brooklyn.

What was so special about this Chelsea/Prince revival of a musical that flopped in 1956?  Everyone who saw the new Candide agreed that a superb feat of staging had transformed a clumping theatrical mastodon into a prancing, dancing gazelle of a show.

The feat was accomplished by freeing Candide from the grip of the proscenium stage.  At the Chelsea, perhaps for the first time, Voltaire's savagely funny picaresque adventure was given enough room to move.  The process began last summer.  Starting with word pictures and then moving on to drawings and scale models (some only shoebox size), Prince and his stage and costume designers, Eugene and Franne Lee, whose innovative talents have been employed by the likes of Peter Brook and Richard Schechner, developed an intricate and magical plan for Candide's stay in Brooklyn.

The tiny, 180-seat theater on the fourth floor of the Academy of Music became a ramped and runwayed circus midway, surrounded by booths and mini-stages that could be changed, in a twinkling, from a corpse-littered battlefield to a vizier's seraglio.  The audience sat up, down, and all around, on stools, benches and ballpark-style "bleachers", between the ramps or along the runways or anywhere they wouldn't be in the actors' way.  Here and there, contributing to the over-all sense of liberating dispersal, sat chunks of the show's small orchestra, its members cheerfully tootling along amidst the crowd like spectators who had suddenly been inspired to play along for the fun of it.

The Chelsea audience, seated on a first-come, first-served basis, quickly realized that it was in a show, rather than at a show.  Not that the spectators were called upon to perform, or forced into the action.  It was simply that Candide, Cunegonde, Dr. Pangloss, and company, and their fun-filled world of war, rape, greed and pestilence, were unavoidably, gloriously everywhere the audience chanced to look.

Heads swiveled madly as the action ricocheted around the low-ceilinged room.  Members of the audience found themselves rubbing shoulders with young Candide as he sat down in their midst to sing a mournful lament for his lost love, the beautiful Cunegonde, or sharing that lovely lady's boudoir as she trilled the dividends of limitless lust; or shifting, ducking and generally making way for the soldiers, priests, whores, aristocrats, inquisitors, sailors, eunuchs, executioners and other species of the Voltairean zoo who cavorted, crept and clowned the night away.

The word got around in a hurry — Candide was a ball — and soon there wasn't a ticket to be had.  The Chelsea had a hit on its hands, and this, in turn, was a victory for director Prince and his designers and a problem for the Chelsea.

For Prince, the show's runaway success was a vindication of his feeling that Candide needed a completely fresh approach.  "I'd seen the original version on Broadway and hated it," he says.  "It was a heavy, pretentious, labored production that bored me.  It had Leonard Bernstein's great score, but it had a bad book, a bad mix of production values and it had been badly directed by a great director, Tyrone Guthrie.  It was a "classic" instead of a theater piece."

So now the Chelsea was home to a theater piece that everyone was calling a classic.  Why, then, get into the complicated and expensive business of moving the show from Brooklyn to Broadway?  What's a hit for, if not to run?

Michael David, Chelsea's executive director, points out that Chelsea is not in business to produce hits.  "Candide was approached simply as one of four things we were doing this year.  The fact that it was a "hit" left us with the same problem we've always had — we're broke as hell.  It cost us about $100,000 to get to the first public performance of Candide, and the show ran here at a loss from beginning to end.  I know it was a sell-out, but at our low ticket prices that means a maximum weekly gross of $7,000.  Our break-even figure for this production was $10,500, so that works out to a loss of $3,500 a week.  But that's what we're here for; basically, we always lose money."

But you can bet your prospectus that Candide is not being brought to Broadway to lose money.  Chelsea's losses are covered by various grants; the money for Candide's move was raised in the traditional way, and backers will bleed greenly if the show dies.

The decision to shift Candide to Broadway, after its month-long stand as part of the Chelsea's schedule, raised the ante considerably.  Many technical problems related to the show's unique staging, plus the harsh economic realities of the commercial theater nowadays, ballooned the new budget.  Where Candide had made it for $100,000 in Brooklyn, the Broadway price-tag toted up to $450,000.  ("It damn well ought to cost less," snorts Prince.  "It's supposed to look like it cost a nickel.")  The show will have to take in $65,000 a week just to break even.

Broadway's high operating costs posed a dilemma.  What theater would be large enough to accommodate an adequate paying audience, but not so large as to lose the intimacy, the close contact between audience and actors that was so much a part of Candide's success?  The choice of the cavernous Broadway Theater, which seats 2,000, meant a total revamping of the theater's interior to limit the audience to no more than 900.

How do you make a 2,000-seat auditorium look and function like a vest-pocket theater-in-the-round for an audience of 900?  You begin by removing most of the seats from the orchestra.  Then, you lead the show away from the proscenium by extending the stage into the audience area via those celebrated ramps and runways.  You bring in banks of benches and bleachers to replace a lot of the standard theater seats.

To retain the feeling of intimacy, you close off most of the Broadway's endlessly receding balcony and you hang a lighting grid overhead to give the effect of a lowered ceiling.  Then you salt the audience with pinches of orchestra and, presto, Brooklyn comes to Broadway.  Everything's the same, just a little bigger.  Anyone who saw Candide at the Academy should feel quite at home inside the revamped Broadway.

Ironically, this is not the first time the Broadway Theater has changed its looks under the transforming hand of Eugene Lee.  It was Lee who, in 1972, tore out the Broadway's orchestra, put seats on the stage and musicians in the boxes, and generally raised theatrical hell for the disastrous debut of the musical Dudes.  The producers of Dude had to restore the theater to its original condition after the show closed, which it speedily did; now it is being torn apart all over again for Candide.

So the high price of staging was one factor in the inflation of Candide's budget.  Another inflationary influence was the Musicians Union, which threw an economic rock of its own.  The way Prince tells it, the union's attitude was not the best of all possible attitudes.

"In Brooklyn we had 13 musicians.  The Broadway Theater contract, which is based on the theater's regular seating capacity of 2,000, calls for 25 musicians and a conductor.  But we're only going to seat 900 people, so I went to the union on that basis.  We're not reorchestrating, I said, all we need is 13 musicians; all we're seating is 900 people.  The union said no, and I consider it very shortsighted of them, amounting to featherbedding.  I'll use them because I have to, but they'll be substantially increasing my budget in a situation where I have a limited potential.  I have great feelings of acrimony over the way they dealt with us."

What it all comes down to for the theatergoer is higher ticket prices.  In Brooklyn, Candide had a $5.50 top for Friday and Saturday evenings, $3.75 on other nights.  At the Broadway, for a reserved seat on a Saturday night, the top will be no less tha $15.  Candide, old boy, welcome to the Big Time.

First things first.  Bigger can be better.  The Chelsea Theater's production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide, which has just moved from the Chelsea premises at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the Broadway Theater proves this abundantly.  Candide is even sharper, funnier, wittier and, if possible, more musically elegant than it was in Brooklyn.  It had its official Broadway press opening Sunday afternoon and it went like champagne.

Conceivably this is the best score ever written for a Broadway musical.  Well, perhaps, best is a controversial word — for who decides among giants such as Gershwin, Porter or Bernstein.  But certainly, the Candide score is the most sophisticated and ambitious.  Only Stephen Sondheim in A Little Night Music has followed this direction, and Mr. Bernstein pointed the way a long time ago.  This is a musical for people who like serious theater, in addition to people who just like musicals.

When Candide was first staged it [was recorded].  Everybody bought and loved the record — but many found the stage show disappointing.  It was a show sunk by its book and, just as much, by the conventional approach to its [staging].  Harold Prince, the new director, has said to hell with the past.

He has kept, of course, the music, and most of the lyrics by the poet and Moliere translator, Richard Wilbur, but brought in a new book by Hugh Wheeler.  He has also added a couple of lyrics by Mr. Sondheim, which can never be a bad idea.

Then he has put the entire thing into a giant fun-house of an environmental theater.  The production has been designed by those experts, Eugene and Franne Lee, and they have knocked the innards out of this respectable Broadway house and made it into an obstacle course of seats, musician's areas, catwalks, drawbridges and playing platforms, with one conventional stage thrown in at the end of the space for good measure and convenience.

Hugh Wheeler's new book is not perhaps always true to the letter of Voltaire, but it does play very fair with the spirit.  It has the right irony and a superb sense of the ridiculous.

It would be unfair to tell the story in detail.  Unfair? — it would be downright impossible.  But loosely, very loosely, it is the story of two young people in love.  They are Candide, an innocent who remains an innocent, and Cunegonde, who also remains an innocent but starts out life raped by a regiment of Bulgarian foot soldiers and finds herself with a slightly variant view of chastity.

Dominating this Voltaire-style view of life is Dr. Pangloss, who believes, of course, "that we live in the best of all possible worlds," and that everything turns out for the best — especially disaster.  And disasters abound.  The characters of this play have the worst of times — they are raped, flogged, shipwrecked, hanged, killed, and one of them — most memorably — loses her left buttock.  Voltaire's world was not an easy one.

Marvelous music — a mixture of Strauss, Offenbach and even Sullivan that remains forever and cheekily Bernstein.  The liquidly witty lyrics and Mr. Wheeler's absurdist but delightful book all lend themselves willingly to Mr. Prince's alchemy.

Mr. Prince has, in the past, given Broadway innumerable gifts, but nothing so gaudy, glittering and endearing as this.  It is one of those shows that takes off like a rocket and never comes down.  One presumes it is picked up somewhere in the South Pacific long after you have gotten home.  Every rocket needs a booster, and Patricia Birch's choreography provides just that.

The cast is perfect.  However let me, perforce, restrict myself to the lovers, Mark Baker as the wide-eyed Candide, Maureen Brennan as a sexual coloratura, Deborah St. Darr as the sweetly amenable Paquette and Sam Freed as a handsomely resourceful Maximilian.  And, even more important, let me commend June Gable's brilliant Old Lady and Lewis J. Stadlen's multifarious performance as Voltaire, Pangloss, and half the other roles in the show.  Mr. Stadlen seemed everywhere at once, and everywhere he was, he was brilliant.

This is a doll of a show.  I loved it and loved it.  I think Voltaire would have loved it too.  If he didn't — to hell with him.