For 40 years, Candide has been the musical theater's most famous work in progress.  It's been nipped and tucked, restyled and refitted, expanded for opera houses and contracted for funky performance spaces.  Now director Harold Prince is bringing the classic Leonard Bernstein show back to where it all began — Broadway — in what may finally be a definitive version.  With one last bit of custom tailoring — this time, for star Andrea Martin.

"When I talked to Andrea Martin, she said it wasn't really tempting," said Prince, who approached the SCTV star to play a secondary comic role — an old woman — in this new version of the musical.  "I said, `How would you like it if I gave you an entrance earlier in the evening?' and she said, `How can you do that?' and I said, `I have an idea.'  I wrote an entrance for her right in the beginning — an intrusion, and [the narrator] banishes her.  Then I brought her back a little later.  Finally, when it's time for her to enter, she's missing.  "Then I called Sondheim, and said, `Write me some more lyrics for Andrea,' and he delivered them a week ago, and they're wonderful.  That's how things have evolved with this show."

That's Sondheim as in Stephen Sondheim — one of a long list of Broadway greats who have had a hand in shaping this unwieldy masterpiece over four decades.  Among the others: lyricists Richard Wilbur and John Latouche, playwrights Hugh Wheeler and Lillian Hellman, and directors Tyrone Guthrie and Prince himself.  This time, after 20 years and three attempts, Prince believes he's finally gotten it right. 

"This version is a happy marriage of all the elements," said the legendary Broadway producer-director who has put his stamp on shows like West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Sweeney Todd, and Phantom of the Opera.  In addition to Martin, the Candide cast includes Jim Dale, Arte Johnson, and opera singers Harolyn Blackwell and Jason Danieley. 

With all its headaches, Candide should be a happy respite for Prince after his miseries on Whistle Down the Wind, the much-publicized Andrew Lloyd Webber show that flopped in Washington, D.C., in February.  He also has three touring productions of Show Boat to oversee, as well as five major productions of Phantom of the Opera worldwide, and a new show, Parade, due sometime in the fall. 

"I have the ability to switch gears — to move to one project when stymied by another," said the director, who was recovering from the Wind debacle in Miami last month before plunging into seven weeks of Candide rehearsals.  If anyone can bring off a definitive version of Candide, it's Prince — who worked a similar miracle with his 1994 Tony-winning revival of "Show Boat."  Both are huge, ungainly shows that continue to be revived because of their brilliant songs — and despite clumsy books that are tweaked and rewritten each time. 

From the beginning, when Candide did a 73-performance belly-flop on Broadway in 1956, the show has been the stuff of which legends — and ulcers — are made.  The music was a hit right away: the Candide overture became an instant concert staple, the cast album with Barbara Cook became a cult item, and the comic aria "Glitter and Be Gay" became the favorite encore of every coloratura soprano who ever gave a recital. 

But the show itself -- what was it?  Opera or musical?  Highbrow social satire, or lowdown slapstick farce?

It was playwright Lillian Hellman's leaden dialogue that, most agree, sunk the 1956 version, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, despite universal acclaim for Bernstein's frothy operetta score.  "It was dispiriting, heavy going," recalled Prince, who at age 28 saw the original Candide soon after he had been signed to co-produce Bernstein's next project: the now-classic West Side Story.  "All I thought at the time was, this is a great score but the musical doesn't work," Prince said.  Clearly, Hellman and Bernstein had different ideas when it came to Voltaire's 1759 satire about the bumbling optimist Candide, who keeps insisting that "all is for the best" despite shipwrecks, earthquakes, disease, poverty, treachery, lechery, war, and injustice. 

In 1972, Brooklyn's Chelsea Theater approached Prince with the idea of directing a small-scale version of the show, retaining the Bernstein score but substituting a new slapstick book by Hugh Wheeler.  That version, transplanted to Broadway, became a huge success, winning five Tonys and running 740 performances.  But at a price.  This rip-roaring new Candide, with its Monty Python humor, scaled-down 13-piece orchestra, abbreviated score, and youthful, vocally limited cast cavorting in and around the audience, gave short shrift to the music.  In 1982, Prince tried again — this time in a full-scale City Opera production that wedded real singers, a full orchestra, and a more complete score to the new book from the 1973 production.  Yet another Candide, combining elements of all three earlier versions, was staged in 1988 by John Mauceri and Jonathan Miller for Scottish Opera, and had runs in Glasgow and London. 

This latest revival is based on a version Prince did for Chicago's Lyric Opera two years ago.  This time, he believes, he's finally gotten the formula right.  "It's the first time I've been able to people the show with a mix, instead of having a company that's one thing or the other," Prince said.  "You're able to accommodate the musical demands at their best, and the storytelling demands at their best."

Leonard Bernstein's Candide, one of the most glorious scores ever written for Broadway, has been, in effect, orphaned for 40 years.  Hal Prince's current production provides it yet another unsatisfactory foster home. 

At birth, in 1956, the score was swaddled in a book by Lillian Hellman which, though heavyhanded and humorless, served the music well.  She at least gave Voltaire's story of an innocent youth surviving countless horrors, a satire on 18th-century optimism, a coherent narrative.  The musical did not find an audience then but built one through its unsurpassed original cast album. 

In 1973, Prince had the happy idea of creating a version that would make the work less imposing.  At BAM, the actors cavorted all around the audience.  This structureless version, with a book by Hugh Wheeler, moved to Broadway a year later.  It demonstrated the theatricality of the score but shortchanged its musical values drastically. 

When Prince directed Candide for the City Opera in 1982, he retained Wheeler's carnival-style book, which is only marginally funnier than Hellman's and a lot longer. 

He has used the same version for this production, but cleaned it up a bit.  Actors in horse costume galloping onto the stage now mar only the climax of the brilliant overture rather than the whole thing.  The fine soprano Harolyn Blackwell was so preoccupied with the business Prince gave her in "Glitter and Be Gay" that, the night I saw it, she lost the rhythm. 

Prince's premise is that Voltaire set out to entertain his readers, and the musical should do likewise.  This is true.  Forty years on, however, it is clear that whatever of Voltaire's spirit or wit the musical first captured is in Bernstein's music and the original lyrics, which are ill-served by the Wheeler book.  In this revival, even such stalwarts as Andrea Martin and Mal Z. Lawrence cannot get laughs out of the unfunny material.  Nor can Jim Dale, who plays a host of comic roles.  Jason Danieley is a properly innocent Candide.  Blackwell, of course, sings beautifully as Cunegonde.  The sets and costumes match the outwardly merry but ultimately empty style of the production perfectly.  When the final chorus arrives (and all the music sounds first-rate in conductor Eric Stern's hands) it should be exultant.  Here it only brings relief.  The unending hilarity, is, thank heaven, over and we can go home. 

Certain forms of exhibitionism are to be encouraged, and Harolyn Blackwell's strutting her impressive set of vocal cords in the new revival of Candide, which opened Tuesday night at the Gershwin Theater, is definitely one of them. 

As Cunegonde, the eternally virginal courtesan in Harold Prince's sour, exhaustingly overstaged production of the Leonard Bernstein musical, Ms. Blackwell of course gets the score's flashiest showpiece: the ridiculously, delightfully ornate "Glitter and Be Gay", a sendup of every show-off coloratura aria ever written.  It's a taxing piece, all right, with sung strings of sobs and laughter flying into the outer space of the musical register.  Yet Ms. Blackwell, who has starred at the Metropolitan Opera, gives the impression that this is the sort of thing she tears off in the shower on a daily basis.  As she punctuates a particularly elaborate series of "ha's" by thrusting her jeweled fan toward the audience, the implicit, charmingly arrogant message is "Bet you can't do anything like this."  Yet if Ms. Blackwell gives the deceptive impression that this sort of vocalizing comes as easily as breathing to her, she seems much less at ease with the physical staging that accompanies the song.  She's right to be. 

Mr. Prince has the not so ingenuous Cunegonde, who is ostensibly lamenting her fall from virtue, plucking assorted jeweled accessories off the resplendently dressed organist who appears to be accompanying her.  It's a clever, if strained, bit of business (which Mr. Prince has used before), but not half as clever as the music it is meant to set off, and it starts to get in Ms. Blackwell's way.  The soprano and the score emerge as victors in this particular battle, but it's a close call.  Other numbers in the musical, an adaptation of Voltaire's iconoclastic philosophical tale, are more obviously casualties of the director's excesses. 

For nearly a quarter of a century, Mr. Prince, a legendary showman of the American theater, has enjoyed a reputation as the white knight who saved Candide from disaster.  In its original Broadway incarnation in 1956, directed by Tyrone Guthrie with a book by Lillian Hellman, the show was widely dismissed as tedious and pretentious and ran for only 73 performances. 

Still, Bernstein's shimmering, eclectic score (with lyrics by Richard Wilbur, with some additions by John LaTouche and Dorothy Parker) made an impression, and the cast album, featuring Barbara Cook and Robert Rounseville, became an essential part of any music lover's library. 

In the early 1970s, Mr. Prince oversaw a thorough reworking and condensing of the show, with a new, livelier book by Hugh Wheeler, additional lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and, most crucially, an environmental, fun-house staging that placed the audience in the middle of the action. 

First seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1973, moving to Broadway the next year, it was frantic, colorful and irreverent, as hip theatrical experiences were largely meant to be in those days.  Mr. Prince revisited Candide in 1982, with a popular, musically expanded production for the New York City Opera, which adapted the spirit of his '70s hit for the proscenium stage. 

In this latest version, a production of Livent Inc. (which brought us Mr. Prince's Showboat), he is sticking to the same sensibility, blanketing the Gershwin's stage with eye-popping scenery (by Clarke Dunham), tricks and gimmicks.  And what once seemed an act of resuscitation is now beginning to feel closer to suffocation. 

The score of Candide remains absolutely delectable, and the orchestra performs it beautifully under the direction of Eric Stern.  Moreover, it not only has in Ms. Blackwell a Cunegonde who happily scales the dangerous peaks of her songs, but an enchanting, honey-voiced Candide in Jason Danieley, who recently shone in Floyd Collins. 

Add to this the inestimable comic charm of Andrea Martin, as the long-winded Old Lady who accompanies Candide and Cunegonde through their cataclysmic journeys around the world, and the versatility of Jim Dale, who stars as the show's narrator (Voltaire, of course) and the fatuous Pangloss, the philosophizing pedant who insists that all's for the best in this best of all possible worlds. 

Yet the show, which also features Arte Johnson (of Laugh In fame) and Mal Lawrence in a giddy assortment of supporting roles, seems desperately busy and overpackaged.  Mr. Prince has said he took his idea for the production, which presents Candide's wide-eyed wanderings as though it were part of a traveling freak show, from reading that Voltaire had intended his novella to be an impious prank. 

But Voltaire's prank was executed with elegance, not a description that comes to mind here.  The style of the show is an overblown mixture of cynicism and cuteness, reflected in Clarke's lurid storybook sets, Judith Dolan's comic-book costumes and Patricia Birch's acrobatic choreography, which this time around lacks precision and briskness. 

A few of the scenes — for example, the ocean voyage to South America and Ms. Martin's dance with a chorus of elderly vaqueros — are charmingly realized.  But many of the others — like the auto-da-fe scene of the Spanish Inquisition, Mr. Johnson's labored impersonation of a rabbi and a hootchy-kootchy harem vignette — have a sophomoric vulgarity. 

The worst of all this is that it neglects to acknowledge the profound wit of Bernstein's music.  The score is in itself an admirable model of how to integrate far-flung cultural influences, from grand opera to a self-described "Jewish tango", into one finely synthesized whole. 

Jokey devices like flying artificial falcons and a guru suspended over the audience in a trapeze swing may add spice to what remains a confusing, episodic book.  But they don't begin to match the music's finesse and imagination, which simultaneously embraces parody and celebration of the different forms it quotes.  The soaring sentimentality of the climactic "Make Our Garden Grow", for example, is sabotaged by having rows of elephantine, greeting-card-ish sunflowers spring up. 

Mr. Dale, whose skills as a quick-change character artist are formidable, is as smooth as ever as the evening's host, though he often seems as though he's gone on automatic pilot.  Ms. Martin is terrific, however, in a disarmingly warm, wonderfully timed performance that respects the line between comic exaggeration and grotesqueness.  (She really deserves a starring vehicle of her own.)

Mr. Danieley and Ms. Blackwell, both in excellent voice, give lovely interpretations that manage to find real, bewildered hearts beneath their characters' cartoon ingenuousness and their deliberately artificial, satiric love songs.  When they sing "Oh Happy We" or "You Were Dead You Know", you can briefly imagine that Candide is truly one of the best of all possible musicals, but only if you close your eyes. 

It dazzles, it soars, it coruscates — it's one of the great operettas of our time.  It's Leonard Bernstein's masterpiece, musically far finer than his soggily melodic West Side Story, and it's back on Broadway. 

It, of course, is the Bernstein-Hugh Wheeler-John Latouche (the latter two with a friendly assist from Stephen Sondheim) musical, Candide, starring Jim Dale in a new, definitive staging by Harold Prince.  It arrived last night at the Gershwin Theater. 

This is either the third or the fifth time Prince has staged Candide — depending on how you count his ways — but not because he didn't get it right the first time, but because he has kept on getting it better. 

As many know, the original Princeless Broadway production of Candide in 1956 was a failure, and it was not a success until 1973 when Prince staged his first "environmental" chamber production for the Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn, later expanded for Broadway, with a new book by Wheeler replacing the original unwieldy and unfunny Lillian Hellman version. 

This Wheeler concept, which stays surprisingly close to its source, the 1759 Voltaire novel, has become the standard, with the original Wilbur and LaTouche lyrics being touched up here and there by Sondheim, who has added a little extra to this present production. 

As with his opera-house stagings in both New York and Chicago, Prince has now returned the show to a proscenium setting, but has done so with an exuberance that perhaps eluded him when he mounted it for the New York City Opera. 

In any event, this new Candide is a joyous experience, an operetta to savor musically (although in this regard the orchestra could be better, audiences having grown accustomed to Philharmonic-grade playing of this score) and a Broadway musical to enjoy irrationally.  Here in picaresque extravagance are all the travails and travels of Candide and his companions as our hero puts to the test the Leibnitz-inspired optimism about "the best of all possible worlds" given to him by his teacher, the crusty Dr. Panglass, until Candide learns to "cultivate his own garden."

Voltaire's satiric bite is gone, but Wheeler's comedy, made broader and mildly bawdy for Broadway, remains a delight, and with Wilbur's graceful lyrics, Bernstein's incandescently eclectic and bubbling music and all the skittish characterizations, the show has become, through Prince's adroit ministrations, foolproof.

The scenery, as, I think, with all of the Prince versions, is by Clarke Dunham, who has outdone himself by envisaging this new Candide as a kind of traveling medicine show.  The colorful permanent set, spilling over the proscenium arch into the seating areas, is used as backdrop for a virtual procession of decorative schemes and wheezes.

Into this magic pop-up picture book, Judith Dolan's imaginative costumes practically cascade, and helping Prince keep the whole thing moving like a whirligig, are Patricia Birch's dances which seem seamlessly incorporated.

If this were, indeed, the best of all possible worlds, the brightest musical of the spring season would not be a revival with a Leonard Bernstein score from 1956 and a Hugh Wheeler book from 1973.

In the faraway best of all possible worlds, Harold Prince would again be directing clever, irreverent new Stephen Sondheim lyrics instead of some clever, irreverent ones from 24 years ago.  And every darling performer would not be working quite so hard to be adorable.  And the playful episodic fantasy with the enchanting pop-up-book scenery and Bernstein's gloriously eclectic music would not get a little monotonous so long before the end, nor end with quite so sentimental a smiley button.

Perhaps most of all, every delicate and achingly delightful voice, viola and tuba would not be plugged into amplification so we're never sure what exactly is producing each lovingly created and inescapably metallic sound.

But this is Broadway in the spectacle-for-the-sensibility-impaired era.  And even Candide, the innocently sophisticated musical satire that opened deliciously enough last night at the Gershwin Theatre in its third major New York reconsideration, is now, more than ever, very much a Broadway show.

Voltaire, whose 1759 novella inspired this picaresque show-biz romp against hypocrisy, was trying to reconcile the eruption of a volcano in Lisbon — 20,000 people were killed — with the soothing optimistic piety of his day.  The show's cartoon-ethnic vaudevillians (hot-blooded Bulgarians? rich, little, libidinous Jews?) may strike some as humor from a thicker-skinned time.  But the questions — how can so much horror be dumped on a supposedly ideal world by allegedly divine goodness and how can we bear it? — have not aged a bit.

Candide, a legend in the annals of shows that refused to die, began with a famously heavy-handed book by Lillian Hellman in 1956.  As Bernstein saw it, the project was his comment on the "aftermath of Joe McCarthy," on an America with "puritanical snobbery, phony moralism [and] inquisitory attacks on the individual."

He also wrote one of his best scores, an unpretentious combination of opera spoof and homage, seriously funny Latin dances, a "Jewish tango" for the Old Lady (deliriously played by Andrea Martin), eloquent simplicity and ingenious dark humor that always knows its truly precious from its merely cute.

Prince, who resurrected the failed project for the triumphantly scaled-down, one-act, environmental Wheeler-Richard Wilbur-Sondheim version in 1973 and a lengthy full-proscenium, full-orchestra adaptation for New York City Opera in 1982, appears to have put together the best of all possible versions this time.  True, Candide's ongoing journey to rustic enlightenment can get wearing, and you will have to concentrate to find the political edge.

But the show-within-a-sideshow concept makes the busy-ness more than just show business.  Set designer Clarke Dunham and costume designer Judith Dolan (both from the City Opera team) have created a magical quasi-wraparound commedia dell'arte environment — "Dr. Voltaire's Freak Show" — with some theatergoers seated along the sides for not-too-annoying audience involvement.  Many of the scenic touches — including real faces in the tapestries — are taken from the youthful '73 miniature.  But there is a full orchestra in the pit, grownups on the stage and, in an especially swell moment toward the apotheosis, Jim Dale sitting on a pillow suspended over the crowd.

The irresistible Dale, who switches breathlessly from Voltaire-narrator to Dr. Pangloss, the teacher, and other roles, changes wigs and attitudes with the joyful abandon that comes only from utterly confident expertise.  Martin, whose Tony-winnng performance in My Favorite Year is the only thing anyone remembers from that show, is in better company this time — and makes the most of it.  With some new lyrics from Sondheim, her Old Lady with only "half a buttocks" and a terrific song ("I am Easily Assimilated") is part old Jewish aunt, part troll, part Carmen seductress.  When she comes out early in the show to nag, "When the story gets boring, who will be coming to your rescue?," we don't know how right she turns out to be.

Boring is too strong a word, but the other characters do work with a bit less fabulousness.  Jason Danieley makes a suitably bland quasi-hero, the always hopeful boy who tries not to question as he goes through life's misadventures.  Harolyn Blackwell, a coloratura from the opera world (who doesn't sing at all performances), goes against the usually blonde-soubrette type of Cunegonde and, with a tomboy sensuality and a full-throated but elegantly precise "Glitter and Be Gay", makes the role her own.

Brent Barrett and Julie Johnson are aptly self-involved as the pretty-boy Maximilian and the perky Paquette.  Arte Johnson, from TV, and Mal Z. Lawrence, from the borscht belt, have lots of fun with the various stereotypes — religious, national, whatever.  Patricia Birch, who did the original choreography, returns with style with a sweet rag-doll ballet and a soft shoe for "What's the Use?" (dropped from the '73 version).  Human beings, not machinery, move the sets, a touch that supports the people-power message.  If life is not, as the opening song insists, "happiness indeed", it is certainly a pleasure.

Few shows this season looked as scrumptious as the revival of Candide that opened Tuesday at the Gershwin Theater.

The Voltaire-inspired musical about 18th century characters flippantly buffeted between wars, hangings, volcanoes and many continents has Leonard Bernstein's most effervescent Broadway score.  The cast appears virtually perfect.  And this production is directed by Harold Prince, the man who turned the 1956 flop into a 1973 hit.

So much for looks.  Perhaps never has Candide been so emotionally uninvolving.

Prince has always been selective in his inclusion of the music written for the show's many revisions — Bernstein called the 1973 version "a sliver" of what was intended — but he made the sprawling and repetitive story stageworthy, balancing high-toned philosophical elements with lowbrow comedy.

That balance is out the window here.  As in the past, Prince presents it as a circus sideshow, but this time on a grotesquely large scale.  Serious moments are cluttered up with gags.  Unlike in some versions of the show, nobody gets syphilis.  Nobody ends up disillusioned, or even surprised at all the calamities.  You could even miss the show's irony.

As the philosopher Pangloss, Jim Dale's characterization consists mostly of changing disguises.  Jason Danieley and Harolyn Blackwell are vocally accomplished as Candide and Cunegonde, but remain incorruptibly blank.  Only Andrea Martin as the Old Lady has a clue, even though her role is expanded to include lots of irrelevant comedy that keeps the show from earning its philosophical apotheosis, "Make Our Garden Grow".  Might Candide flop again?

A buoyant pop-up book of a musical, Harold Prince's revival of Candide returns one of Broadway's most beloved scores to the theater after worldwide journeys through opera houses and symphony halls.  Impeccably sung, lushly designed and staged with a sure hand by Prince — this is the director's third go-round with Voltaire — the revival adds some much-needed spirit to Broadway's bedgraggled spring lineup.

If the staging occasionally seems to he working too hard, it's most likely the product of the show's legendary weak link — its book.  Confusing at times, lackluster at others, Hugh Wheeler's 1973 hook has always done little more than provide eye candy between the remarkable Leonard Bernstein/Richard Wilbur songs (written for the initial 1956 staging).  Prince knows to keep things moving at a breathless pace, bouncing from one song to the next on Clarke Dunham's expansive carnival of a set.

Unlike Prince's famed "environmental" production of 1973, which turned an entire theater into the set, the current revival is designed for a proscenium stage (although actors occasionally wander into the front rows of the audience).  Whatever circus-like fun is left to '73 is replaced by Dunham's dazzling visual design: elaborately illustrated wooden cutouts, carnival midway banners, party lights and circus wagons turn the stage into a traveling freak show of 18th-century vintage, with flashes of medieval street fairs, Rousseau's jungles and Renaissance glitter.  Judith Dolan's costumes follow a similar, brightly eclectic path.

Bernstein's lovely operetta score — which kept collaborators coming back after the disastrous 1956 staging (that featured a book, later abandoned, by Lillian Hellman) — gets a fine treatment here from a cast headed by Jim Dale, with Jason Danieley making a sweet-voiced Candide, opera singer Harolyn Blackwell easily handling the musical's best-known number ("Glitter and Be Gay") and strong support coming from Brent Barrett and Stacey Logan as Candide's sometime companions.

Andrea Martin, although a better singer than might be expected, has a mostly comic role as the unnamed Old Lady who barges into the action, getting much comedic mileage out of an exaggerated Eastern European accent and a lopsided rear end (readers of Voltaire will know immediately why she has only one buttock; others will have to wait until the musical's end).  Arte Johnson plays a number of secondary comic roles, usually paired with the more versatile Mal Z. Lawrence.

As with Voltaire's novella, the musical Candide has no qualms about gleefully skewering any number of religions, races and nationalities in its depiction of the world's savageries.  As Candide and his beloved Cunegonde (Blackwell) make their separate ways through life's cruelties, they hold fast to the epigram of their teacher Dr. Pangloss (Dale) that this is indeed "the best of all possible worlds" — this despite encounters with war, murder, rape, torture and any number of calamities both natural and man-made.  Through it all, they, and the musical, remain uncommonly cheery and mirthful.

If the approach seems outsized for this musical, the production makes the best of it by featuring a large ensemble that gives full-bodied vigor to the rich, melodic score, particularly on such numbers as "Westphalian Chorale" and "Bon Voyage."  Danieley and Blackwell meld nicely on their big duets, "Oh Happy We" and "You Were Dead You Know," and the entire company, surrounded by growing sunflowers and bathed (by Ken Billington) in yellow light, ends the show with the optimistic "Make Our Garden Grow."  Having traveled its own troubled road since 1956, Bernstein's score has found as good a world as any to make home.

With typical irony, Francois Marie Arouet gave his lean novella Candide the subtitle "Optimism".  Actually it was a grinning critique of the 18th century's excesses and cruelties, as well as a put-down of those contemporary philosophers who believed in the gospel of sweetness and light.  Voltaire (to use the name he preferred) peopled the work with all the types he despised: corrupt politicians, avaricious judges, executioners and torturers, military fools and, for good measure, the Roman Catholic Church — with particular attention paid to priapic monks and inquisitors.  One reading was sufficient for the Great Council in Geneva: They ordered Candide to be burned immediately and the author searched out.

When questioned, Arouet affected a "qui, moi?" attitude, denying that he had anything to do with the book.  "People must have lost their senses to attribute to me that pack of nonsense," he declared with a straight face.  "I have, thank God, better occupations."  Either the investigators bought his story or pretended to, and let the man alone.  But the public was not fooled.  Every reader knew that the Frenchman had no better occupation.  Attacking the powerful was his vocation.

To make a musical from the Voltaireian amalgam of outrage and acid seemed an absurd idea in the early 1950s, when it was announced that Lillian Hellman would write the book, Leonard Bernstein would compose the music, and Richard Wilbur and John LaTouche would provide the lyrics.  As it turned out, the 1956 Broadway production proved creditable at worst, and brilliant at best.  Although Bernstein liked to talk about his affinity with Mahler, during his periods of impudence he edged closer to Voltaire's personality.  James Boswell's description of the philosopher is a perfect fit for Lenny: "He had bold flights.  He had humor.  He had an extravagance; he had a forcible oddity of style that the most comical of our dramatis personae could not have exceeded."

That the stage version of Candide ran only 73 performances was to some extent the fault of the audience rather than the creative team, most of whose talents ran ahead of their time.  Bernstein's overture went on to become part of the symphonic repertory, and the original-cast LP became a collector's item.  Bearing this in mind, a number of producers expressed interest in a revival.  But only Hal Prince could make it happen.  In the early '70s the impresario/director presented Candide on Broadway with a rewritten (but still unremarkable) book by Hugh Wheeler, additional lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and an inadequate cast.  Some 10 years later he brought another version to the stage of the New York City Opera.  The results were mixed: The cast again left something to be desired, and the production seemed too grandiose for Voltaire's miniature.

Yet that version is modesty itself compared to the latest edition of Candide at the Gershwin Theater, directed with vast and thoughtless energy by Prince.  What Voltaire had done to 18th-century France, Bernstein and his collaborators attempted to do to grand opera, sending up Donizetti, Verdi and even the sainted Mozart.  Prince's version is more concerned with lampooning Barnum and Bailey — hardly a daunting goal.  As immense as the stage of the Gershwin is, the director manages to crowd it with tumblers and clowns, aerial suspensions and nonstop costume changes.  The razzle dazzles all right, but the writers' intentions are lost in a chaos of special effects.

The plot seems more practical on the page than on the stage.  Candide (Jason Danieley) has implicit faith in the words of his benign and fatuous tutor, Dr. Pangloss (Jim Dale).  As the Doctor sees it, "It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily have been created for the best end."

The belief that this is the best of all possible worlds is to be sorely tried in the years ahead.  Candide and his virginal young girlfriend Cunegonde (Harolyn Blackwell) are separated when war sunders the peaceful little country of Westphalia.  From then on, life becomes a litany of catastrophes.  Among other misadventures, Candide sees his nation pillaged, his guru hanged, his inamorata abducted, raped and stabbed.  On a hegira that takes him to Paris, Lisbon, Turkey, and Buenos Aires, he meets a variety of sinful individuals including a baron, a Grand Inquisitor and a pasha (all played by Mal Z. Lawrence); a priest, a wealthy Jewish merchant and a judge (all overplayed by Arte Johnson); and a ribald old lady (Andrea Martin) whose sole claim to distinction is that she has only one buttock.  Each expresses a cynicism based on experience and expedience.

No matter how beleaguered, the protagonist will have none of their palaver.  He remains pure in heart and mind despite what he sees and whom he meets.  Decades later, after more incidents than songs, he and his beloved — who has long since descended from soiled village girl to pampered courtesan to impoverished whore — are reunited.  Now reality settles in.  No longer young, no longer green, bereft of dreams and trust, the weary pair agree to forget the past and forgive the present, to settle down quietly and let their garden grow.

The nation's finest cabaret singer, Barbara Cook, was the original Cunegonde, and Blackwell cannot hope to erase her memory.  As a chanteuse the young veteran of the Metropolitan Opera does well enough, particularly with the demanding "Glitter and Be Gay", a number in which the soprano must laugh, descend to a purr and rise to operatic heights all within the space of two bars.  But her acting never rises above the elemental.  In the title role Danieley excels both as singer and actor, as does Dale, who plays six parts including Voltaire (as the narrator), a businessman, governor, gambler, and sage.  As usual with this kinetic Englishman, he is all over the stage and sometimes above it, altering personalities and outfits with the ease of a musician changing keys.

Andrea Martin is, once more, a comedienne par excellence; she has timing, wit and movement.  What she does not have is a script to support her.  Or, for that matter, support to support her.  A series of secondary comedic roles are filled by performers noted for underlining the obvious.  Lawrence, the star of Catskills on Broadway several seasons ago, is essentially a Borscht Belt comedian whose stand-up routines were a Mountain staple for more than 30 years.  Johnson is remembered principally as the Dirty Old Man and the German Soldier in the TV program Laugh-In.  Bearing that in mind, the writers interpolated a line from that show: At one point Dale looks down at the diminutive actor and mutters "Verry interesting," Johnson's TV signature.  That moment encapsulates the Prince attitude: any anachronism for a laugh, even if it violates Voltaire's spirit.  What the hell; for a $75 orchestra seat the ticket holders are entitled to a few in-jokes, right?

Patricia Birch's spastic choreography does little to dispel the aura of a freak show, nor do Judith Dolan's loud costumes and Clarke Dunham's louder sets.  Occasionally something effective occurs: Candide's voyage across the seas, for example, is evoked with the use of voluminous waving bolts of cloth.  But scenes like these are continually nullified by such incidents as the auto-da-fe.  In the course of five minutes it manages a gross mockery of Christianity, Judaism and good taste in general.  True, Voltaire had little use for Christianity, and he was surprisingly anti-Semitic.  But his touch was light; Prince's hands are as heavy as counterweights.  Another laborious interlude, with Cunegonde's brother (Brent Barrett) in drag, is strictly for the wink-and-nudge crowd.  No such event occurs in the book, nor was it in the original production.

Even so, the director and his co-conspirators cannot sully Leonard Bernstein's sparkling melodies, given a splendid setting by the greatest arranger of his day, Hershey Kay.  The composer was in his mid-30s when he wrote these songs, and at the peak of his powers.  Nothing seemed beyond him; gazing at the classicists, he could mock one minute and genuflect the next.  A song like "Oh Happy We" in which the couple plights their troth, each blindly unaware of the other's desires — Cunegonde for a marble palace, Candide for a rustic retreat — is a model of the Italian operatic duet turned on its ear.  "I Am So Easily Assimilated" cannily suggests Russian, Yiddish and Spanish folk dances.  Those who listen closely to the song of rediscovery ("Cunegonde, is it you?  You were shot and bayoneted too."  "That is very true") can never attend to Wagner in quite the same way again.  Yet Candide's final number, "Make Our Garden Grow" is a pure and unaffected tune, sung as it was written, as a hymn to the simple life. 

Would that Prince had heeded it.

Candide also has a carnivalesque mood, seeing the world as a sort of giant sideshow seething with delights and horrors so intertwined that it's hard to have one without the other.

The source of this vision is Voltaire's masterpiece of comic fiction, published in 1759.  The musical had its first incarnation in the mid-1950s but didn't become a hit until 1973, when it acquired a script by Hugh Wheeler to complement Richard Wilbur's lyrics and Leonard Bernstein's music.

The new revival at the Gershwin Theatre has a fresh design, additional Stephen Sondheim lyrics, and performances by a mixture of classical singers, musical-comedy specialists, and comedians.  Jim Dale, Andrea Martin, Harolyn Blackwell, and Jason Danieley are the talented top-liners.

It's as bright and colorful as any supercabaret around, but beneath its exuberance the extravaganza has a hollow ring.  Voltaire's message about the pleasures and perils of life is earnest at its core.  By contrast, renowned director Harold Prince — who also staged the '70s production — plays everything for easy laughs, sometimes so vulgar that even the sardonic French philosopher might have found them distasteful.

Voltaire would have disliked the finale, too.  He ended his book with the suggestion that peacefully "tending one's garden" is the best route to quiet contentment in a sadly imperfect world.  Missing his subtlety, Prince and company pitch garden-tending with the ferocious enthusiasm of a TV commercial gone berserk.

Life may be a cabaret, as Broadway views things.  But it's surely not a shopping-network special.

Near the end of the first act of Candide, the eponymous hero, his courtesan sweetheart Cunegonde, and her duenna are paddling a leaky rowboat to a ship that's to take them to Constantinople.  The rowboat sinks, an apt metaphor for this newest production of the tart-tongued operetta, which was a succes d'estime — but a flop — on Broadway in 1956.  Voltaire's Candide hardly has a plot.  Rather, it's a series of picaresque adventures held together by Leonard Bernstein's dazzling score and the witty lyrics of Richard Wilbur, helped by John LaTouche and Dorothy Parker and, many years later, Stephen Sondheim.  All sink, with nary a trace, under the weight of Harold Prince's staging, which jams together cast and chorus, dancing, sets, and shtick to no apparent purpose.

Twenty-five years ago, Prince put on a bare-bones Candide, including bleacher seats for the audience, that ran more than 700 performances.  However, simple isn't the style of Toronto-based Livent Inc., which backed this edition.  It successfully applied the bigger-is-better approach to Show Boat, the previous occupant of the Gershwin Theater, and has lavished millions on Ragtime, scheduled to open in New York next year.

They're meant as crowd pleasers.  Candide is not.  It's often mean-spirited and bloody-minded, both attributes fully realized in Sondheim's "Auto-da-fe," a satirical hymn to the Spanish Inquisition.  Slaughter is the norm, as Candide discovers he must rationalize like crazy to make his 18th century "the best of all possible worlds."

Prince tries to lighten the load by, among other things, placing Jim Dale, as Dr. Pangloss, in a swing high above the orchestra and having Arte Johnson reprise his "Laugh-In" vaudeville routines of 30 years ago.   Little of it works.  Johnson's broadly accented, lascivious Jew, skewered by Candide in the Lisbon sequence, is embarrassing.  Only Andrea Martin, as Cunegonde's companion, achieves the balance Bernstein, Wilbur, and Lillian Hellman, who wrote the first book, were looking for.

The operetta score requires voices to match.  In 1956, Barbara Cook, Robert Rounseville, and Irra Petina — the last two with grand opera experience — delivered the goods.  Harolyn Blackwell, an opera pro, and Jason Danieley acquit themselves well as the pair on a bumpy road to love.  But neither is helped by overamplification — one of the many "overs" in the production — that homogenizes every voice and the orchestration.  Sometimes it's hard to tell who's singing and from where on the stage.

Candide's path from 1956 to the present is almost as tangled as the protagonists'.  Nearly 17 years after the original closed, Prince stormed back with his 1973 version, including a new book by Hugh Wheeler and the Sondheim lyrics.  It moved to Broadway and a triumphant run.  In 1982, he brought the show back at New York City Center, restoring many of the cuts that had been made in 1973.  Wheeler added new scenes.  Yet another version was presented by the Scottish Opera in 1989.  Finally, Prince reassembled the various parts, plus more additions, into the present production.  The improvements aren't immediately apparent.

For a climactic irony, the only true disaster of the lot came from one of the men who put Broadway in this muddled situation: Harold Price, the most unmusical director in the history of musical theater. I didn't much like his depredation of Bernstein's extraordinary "comic operetta" Candide 20 years ago, when it was youthful and ingenious Now it's ballooned into a sheer horror: Every brilliant number's ruined; even the vocal beauty of fetching Harolyn Blackwell and sturdy Jason Daniele, or Andrea Martin's laugh-getting can't curb the hideousness. With Prince in its past, the musical's future is bound to be brighter. — Michael Feingold The Village Voice, May 6, 1997

Would that this revival of Leonard Bernstein's Candide were half as witty as its costumes.  The goofy wardrobe gleefully references a fairytale trunk's worth of folderol: laced-up bodices, shiny circus frocks, scarlet wise-man robes, and even a couple of head-to-to sheep disguises.  (For those who want to take some of this whimsy home with them, $6 lamb puppets are for sale in the lobby.)  The bastard Candide himself favors delightfully silly Tyrolean shorts, Buster Brown buckled shoes, and straw boaters.  ("He's permitted to wear the best secondhand clothes" the company trills when he's introduced.)  The oft-raped Cunegonde, who grows more cheerful with each violation, mugs in a bouncy white dress and a bonnet straight out of Little Bo Beep.  After repeated ravishments, she adds lurid red and yellow sashes, but always layered over highly visible white pantaloons, as if to remind us of the pure heart lurking unblemished within. — Lynn Yaeger The Village Voice, June 3, 1997