At the end of 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted one of his most exultant concerts in a lifetime of exultant music making.  It was a gala concert performance in London of his Candide, offered with a cast of some of our most celebrated opera stars, young and old.  It was an evening of great emotion, the first (and only) time in his life that Bernstein had conducted what many feel is his best score (popular or serious); it was also the first time all the music to the show had, at last, been heard.  And although Bernstein's voice croaked worse than ever, ill with a flu (and also suffering from the emphysema that would kill him almost exactly 10 months later), he typically couldn't keep quiet. 

He began the evening by speaking to the audience, calling himself "the old professor" and describing, in his best rabbinical manner, the historical motivations for Voltaire to write his famous satire on optimism and our own continuing struggle with good and evil.  Assuming a mock pompous tone when explaining the philosophical background of l'optimisme , he suddenly broke off, saying, "Oh, the hell with it!  Let's play the overture."

Bernstein's little professorial act doesn't quite come off when it is watched on the Deutsche Grammophon video of that concert.  It seems too contrived, as if Bernstein were addressing not the audience but the camera and, by extension, history.  And he probably was, in an understandable attempt to shut everybody up about Candide already. 

Is it an opera, or isn't it?  Is it the operetta that Bernstein, when pressed, initially called it?  Or is it, at heart, the Broadway musical that it was supposed to be all along, but that audiences in the mid-'50s just weren't sophisticated enough to get?  Bernstein had been hearing the same questions for some 35 years, ever since Candide flopped on Broadway.  But they wouldn't go away then.  And they won't go away now, with Candide being revived Wednesday in a new production by Gordon Davidson to celebrate the return of the Center Theatre Group to the newly renovated Ahmanson Theatre. 

They won't go away in part because this production in particular will inevitably draw attention on how much has changed (and how some things haven't changed) since Davidson's famous production of Candide at UCLA in 1966.  It was that production with Davidson's then-resident UCLA company, Theater Group, that brought Candide back to life, the show having been little seen or heard from since its Broadway flop 10 years earlier.  It was also that show that prompted Dorothy Chandler to invite Davidson and his company to become residents of the new Music Center. 

One thing that has changed, of course, is our attitude toward opera and musical theater, and their crossing over into each other's turf.  Candide has, since 1966, succeeded on Broadway; it has been produced in opera houses internationally, and, thanks to Bernstein's extraordinary performance, it has triumphed as a concert work.  The overture is utterly familiar concert fare, both on symphonic and pops programs (to say nothing for having once been the theme music for Dick Cavett's television program).  The comic aria, "Glitter and Be Gay," is sung by coloratura sopranos everywhere. 

No one looked askance when the New York City Opera mounted an opera house production of Candide in 1982 and brought it to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as part of an opera season (the controversy was only about the questionable taste of Harold Prince's slapstick production); no one looks askance now that it is produced by a theater company at the Ahmanson. 

In his extensive notes to Bernstein's Candide recording made at the time of the concert performance, Andrew Porter dismisses those questions about opera and musical, saying that we don't ask them about The Magic Flute, about Offenbach's frilly works or Gilbert & Sullivan.  And Davidson, when asked what Candide is, says that by now we should be flexible enough to understand that it is not any one thing. 

"The complexity and the multiplicity of it is both its genius and maybe has been a bit of its curse," he explains.  "Bernstein was using all the forms — opera, operetta and musical theater forms — with great purpose.  And so you have to embrace the fact that it is many things and it is its own unique thing."

But Candide has had what Bernstein called a checkered career for a reason, and its complex history reveals something important about America's troubled relationship with opera and the difficulty we have had, and continue to have, in establishing a national opera style.  There is no easy summarizing that checkered career.  The score has six different copyright dates for music and lyrics.  Although the principal lyricist was the poet Richard Wilbur, there are additional lyrics by John Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Steven Sondheim and Bernstein himself. 

Someone could probably write a book about the travails of the show's book alone.  Hellman's cumbersome adaptation of Voltaire is usually thought to have been what sunk the original show.  A new adaptation by Hugh Wheeler reworked the show for Prince's revival at the Chelsea Theater in Brooklyn in 1973, which went on to Broadway.  It was gradually extended into an opera house version for the New York City Opera in 1982, and later expanded further, with the participation of John Wells, for a version for the Scottish Opera along with the addition of music never used before.  But the fact is that practically everyone who has attempted to put Candide on the stage has fiddled, in one way or another, with the book. 

In Voltaire's novella, Candide and his fiancee, Cunegonde, suffer the most extraordinary series of tortures and humiliations around the globe, with Candide always trying to maintain the philosophy that we live in the best of all possible worlds.  Voltaire's satirizing of the Catholic Church particularly appealed to Bernstein and Hellman, who saw a parallel between the Inquisition and the Senate's anti-Communist witch hunts, to which they had both been subjected.  But Candide was far too literary and scenically ambitious (every scene is in a different country) for the Broadway stage.  And Bernstein, moreover, chose remarkably highbrow collaborators: a serious playwright and, in Wilbur, a poet who would eventually become the Poet Laureate of the United States.  That also meant three implacable egos.  Hellman was reportedly intractable about anyone touching a word of her prose.  Wilbur, according to Humphrey Burton in his biography of Bernstein, once became so frustrated with Bernstein's own literary pretensions that he told Hellman, "If you catch {Lenny} rewriting my lyrics, clip his piano wires."

Nor does there seem much doubt that Bernstein had operatic ambitions with Candide.  He called it his musical love letter to Europe, and he included many European forms in the songs, from waltz to Scottish dance to comic aria.  He expected Cunegonde (and, to a lesser extent, Candide) to be singers with operatic technique.  And Davidson has followed suit by selecting young American singing actors — Kenn Chester as Candide and Constance Hauman as Cunegonde — with opera backgrounds. 

So why didn't Bernstein just write an opera?

Opera, and especially outdated operetta, were not, in the mid-'50s valid American art forms.  The opera house was (as it mostly still is) a museum of European culture.  And the few successful American operas of the time, like the works of Gian Carlo Menotti and Carlisle Floyd, looked to Europe for musical models, however American their subject matter.  What little indigenous opera there had been had always had a Broadway connection.  In the '30s, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess and Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts — the two finest examples of opera that drew from the American musical vernacular — both were first performed on Broadway (and both with non-operatic all-black casts). 

Postwar "American" opera was outright Broadway opera —l Kurt Weill's Street Scene, Marc Blitzstein's Regina (based upon Hellman's The Little Foxes), and Bernstein's own slight one-acter, Trouble in Tahiti.  They were, in fact, works indistinguishable from the Broadway musical style, except that they weren't comedies, had more music and less talk, and took themselves very seriously.  But whereas Gershwin and Thomson had seemed forward-looking for their time, by the late '40s and early '50s, with the rise of the international avant-garde, Weill and Blitzstein were musical reactionaries. 

Bernstein allied himself with Weill and Blitzstein, but not without looking over his shoulder.  And what he saw, nipping at his heels behind him, were the progressive modernist composers who were the musical optimists of their time.  While Broadway opera tended to focus on the problems with society and personal relationships, the avant-garde had little interest in musical theater or expressing emotion in music.  It was a great era — in all the arts — of abstraction, and composers — be they John Cage or Milton Babbitt in America, Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen in Europe — were utopian, looking for the latest musical discovery, and, to some extent, anarchistic. 

But it was the avant-garde that got the serious attention in composition that Bernstein craved.  And it is not hard to read in Candide, or to hear in Candide, a parody of this kind of musical optimism.  The song "Quiet," for instance, about yawning boredom, caricatures both Cage and 12-tone music.  Yet "Quiet," especially as Bernstein himself conducted it at the end of his life, also happens to contain some of the most eerily beautiful music in the score.  Bernstein had to prove he could do everything, not just write an infectious waltz but also write infectious 12-tone music, too. 

That Bernstein did not want to choose sides, in his life or his music, is evident from everything he was doing at the time he was composing Candide.  He was also working on a sophisticated genuine musical, West Side Story, and cementing his relationship with the New York Philharmonic.  In the remarkable 10 months between December, 1956, and September, 1957, Candide had opened and closed on Broadway (after 73 performances), West Side Story had opened and triumphed, and Bernstein, at 39, had become the first American music director and the youngest music director of the New York Philharmonic. 

It was all too much.  Broadway wasn't ready for Voltaire.  And Bernstein was pulled in too many directions in his career and with Candide.  He wanted a show that, at the same time, skewered the political right and the musical left, that celebrated Europe in its music but that was still quintessentially American.  He wanted a show that was truly comedic and gay, but that had profound spiritual overtones as well.  Ultimately, Candide and Cunegonde take a spiritual journey, and only through knowing themselves and not have unreasonable expectations can they, as they sing in the transcendent finale, make their garden grow. 

That finale, "Make Our Garden Grow," which has become one of Bernstein's most beloved songs, may well have been its sticking point all along.  Could Bernstein, who was living in the best of all possible worlds, have, in 1956, persuaded anyone of that spiritual journey?  In a review of Davidson's 1966 production, Times music critic Martin Bernheimer wrote that the finale was the one weakness that marred the original score, finding that it "remains maudlin, both in sentiment and in sound.  It represents the kind of romantic gesture to which Bernstein has always been prone, the kind he steadfastly avoided in Candide until this crucial point."

Although Davidson claims that after 30 years he doesn't even remember the details of his earlier production, he says that probably what has changed most about our attitude toward Candide over the years is what that finale means to us today and what Bernstein did to change its impact. 

"I think there is a difference in sensibility between then and now," he explains.  "That notion of the power of redemption and transformation, which is the foundation of the finale, is a bit more tentative in 1995 terms.  We all want to believe that if one person takes care of himself and if from that uneasy base we build community that it will lead to a soaring magnificence."  But Davidson notes that panaceas are not so easy anymore, and that no longer "simply by knowing the truth can you then expect to automatically go the next step."

For his new production, Davidson will include a chorale about universal good that was not in any of the earlier versions, and only first heard in Bernstein's concert performance.  It is played three times, at beginning, midway and end, and each time with different lyrics which Bernstein wrote himself.  The first time it is all bright optimism; the second time it questions those initial absolutes.  Finally, when it is sung as prelude to "Make Our Garden Grow," Davidson finds that "we're not so sure anymore."

That we can no longer be so certain that Candide and Cunegonde, even through self knowledge, will succeed in their relationship, changes the entire meaning of the song.  (It is probably no coincidence that Bernstein was obsessed with psychoanalysis but lived a life of hopelessly entangled relationships.)  Writing in the notes to his 1984 recording of West Side Story, Bernstein explained that that show was not an opera because it did not resolve itself in the music.  One could then say that Candide originally was not an opera because it resolved too facilely. 

But when Bernstein conducted Candide in London, there was no question that his conception of the piece, grand, bloated even, was all now of a piece, that he conceived it as a large spiritual journey akin to that of a Mahler symphony, with the finale being both as imposing as Mahler and as questioning.  And because of that, Candide no longer seems a reactionary work.  It has even become a postmodern model for American composers facing an operatic downsizing '90s after a lavish operatic '80s.  Most notably, John Adams and Peter Sellars, responsible for two of the most noted American operas of recent years, Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, have lately turned to music theater with popular song. 

Not only does their latest collaboration, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, take its musical inspiration directly from Weill and Bernstein, but it also takes the same kind of hard look at a complacent America in the mid-'90s, in which a time bomb is ticking, that Bernstein and Hellman took.  Also like Candide, Ceiling/Sky had a significant flop at its first performance that has required rewriting and reworking and, consequently a re-evaluation.  It surely would have amused the old professor that not only is Candide the model for a whole new form of postmodern music theater for century's end — which also includes collaborations between Robert Wilson and Tom Waits (The Black Rider and Alice) and Randy Newman's current Faust — but that we still don't know what to call it.  Operetta, today, is simply a dead issue. 

But most likely his reply would still be the same as it was at the end of the '80s: Oh, the hell with it!  Just play the overture!

In the beginning there was Gordon Davidson's brave, clever and sprightly little production for the Theater Group — it wasn't the Center Theater Group yet — at UCLA in 1966.  Here, the lumbering Broadway musical, which had flopped a decade earlier, emerged perfectly focused, perfectly wicked and witty.  Bernstein's music bubbled and bristled, as needed.  The watered-down Voltaire libretto retained as much of its edgy satire as the sometimes sappy composer would permit.  And, quite incidentally, Carroll O'Connor, then a little-known, low-budget character actor, did some pre-Bunker bumbling as the eternal optimist and eternal pessimist in residence.  Still, the show — call it an opera, an operetta, a musical comedy; call it whatever you like — remained a victim of its libretto, a thick broth spoiled by many too many talented chefs.  This became all the more clear in a bloated Civic Light Opera edition, which showed up at the Music Center five years later.

Hal Prince pruned the piece down to a lean and lusty 90 minutes for a brilliant and drastic revision that played Broadway, both on and off, in 1973.  Then, nearly a decade later, he turned to the other cheeky extreme for an extended leaden laff-riot at the New York City Opera.  It eventually made its cumbersome way to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as well as the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

And now, traveling full circle, Gordon Davidson's original Candide — or an unreasonable facsimile thereof — is back.  It's back in a lavish, splashy, broad and smirky production at the recently renovated Ahmanson Theatre.  The black-tie crowd at the gala opening on Wednesday greeted and treated it with cheers worthy of a second coming.  But, the inevitable cliche query looms.  Is this the best of all possible Candides?

Well. . . .

It does have Constance Hauman — happily remembered as a daredevilish Zerbinetta in Long Beach — as an irresistibly glittery and indomitably gay Cunegonde.  This noble wenchette sustains purity amid rape and raunch and ruin.  This wide-eyed innocent tippy-toes daintily through numerous hostile worlds with a perfect snicker and pearly tones that blossom in the coloratura stratosphere.  Forget the baby Barbara Cook.  Forget the glamorous Mary Costa.  This is the real sexy-and-selfless-little-me bravura thing.

The new Candide also can boast a terrific new Candide in Kenn Chester, last noticed playing Beppe to Pavarotti's Canio in a televised Pagliacci from the Met.  As Bernstein's reincarnation of L'il Abner, the tenorino is dauntlessly boyish, sweetly lyrical, magnificently stupid.  He even knows how to float a high pianissimo to signal deep introspection.

Nancy Dussault, who not long ago was a savvy soubrette and endearing ingenue, turns up here as the eminently practical Old Lady with the strange Slavic accent and compromised posterior.  She isn't particularly old.  She cannot emulate Irra Petina's chest tones.  In this version, she doesn't even get to utter the deathless plaint about being "homesick for any place but here."  But she is spunky and sporty, silly and smart.  It is more than enough.  The busy, well-chosen supporting cast is dominated by a would-be Heldentenor named Roland Rusinek as a Governor capable of a really stentorian ring.  Peter Wexler's quasi-unit set, a modification of his 1966 effort, frames and propels the action with picturesque invention.  Yehuda Hyman's farcical choreography springs neatly from the action, as does David Craig's "vocal staging," whatever that may be.  The chorus is fine.

But. . . .

Now that Bernstein has been canonized, no one dares leave much of his work on the cutting-room floor.  The current production, based, it clumsily says here, on "the Scottish Opera Edition of the Opera House Version," rambles on and on and on.  The songs are inventive, catchy, spicy, endearing — up to if not including the suddenly mawkish anti-Voltairean finale.  Too bad there are too many of them.  Lasting a long three hours, the show begins to sprawl just when it should begin to soar.  Every note may indeed be a masterpiece, but that doesn't mean the retention of every note — well, nearly every note — reinforces the dramatic structure.

Davidson's direction evolves in nifty strokes of stylistic mockery and genre caricature.  One would like to see him cast an irreverent glance at Gilbert and Sullivan or Offenbach.  In this Candide, however, the satirical souffle threatens to deflate as the songs begin to become repetitive and the jokes begin to unwind.  William Schallert dodders pleasantly as a faintly Germanic Dr. Pangloss, pales as a muted Martin.  One applauds his penchant for understatement at both extremes of Weltanschauung .  Still, one longs for comic impulses a bit more cynical and crusty.  The scrappy 22-piece orchestra in the pit plays with plenty of pizazz for Lucas Richman.  Unfortunately, the infernal microphones ("Sound," it says here, "by Jon Gottlieb") make the band sound raucous, not rich.  And therein lies a major rub.

When Candide played the 3,200-seat Pavilion, across the plaza, no amplification was needed.  In the intimately revamped Ahmanson, reduced for this run to a mere 1,600 seats, everyone uses body mikes.  Make that head mikes.  The singers wear their amplification in their hair.  The result doesn't look pretty, and it certainly doesn't sound pretty.  At least Davidson & Co. let us get away without supertitles.  Life is happiness indeed.

"Make Our Garden Grow," the finale of Leonard Bernstein's 1956 musical Candide, is among the most breathtaking theater songs ever written.  As in Voltaire's exquisite short masterwork, from which the musical is adapted, the hapless innocent Candide and his all-too-corruptible love Cunegonde are finally reunited after a separation that includes earthquake, rape, prostitution, thievery and an auto-da-fe.  Candide, who has been heretofore faithful to a ludicrous doctrine from his teacher Dr. Pangloss, finally finds the courage to shake off optimistic platitudes and embrace the imperfect Cunegonde as she is — mortal, guilty and entirely beautiful.

After an evening full of witty, opulent songs, the stage is cleared for this gorgeous finale.  "We must cultivate our gardens," says the book's Candide, stoically, after suffering every disappointment a moral and naive young man can suffer.  But what is, in the book, only a resigned determination to go on with life, in the musical becomes a glorious — but not sentimental — anthem to honest living, to the shedding of ridiculous illusions. If Davidson's Candide ends with universal truth, it starts out on a provincial note so wobbly that one worries the show will never recover.  Cast members, dressed in contemporary black tie, take the stage in a tacked-on prologue to discuss the attributes of the remodeled Ahmanson Theatre, the interior of which is projected on a screen behind them (not exactly an overwhelming image).  In dialogue that, understandably, no one is credited with, the actors remind us not only that the newly refurbished Ahmanson is "intimate" but also, and even more condescendingly, that the theater is relevant to our lives.  In keeping with that tone, topical jokes, including references to O.J. Simpson and Sen. Bob Packwood, are sprinkled throughout the evening, few of them successful.

Davidson returns to the show (he directed it here in 1966) in what seems a loose and jovial mood.  If he allows in dreck, he also must be credited with exposing the show's charms by genuinely loving them, as can best be seen in the performances of his two stars.  As Cunegonde, Constance Hauman spans two worlds — she sings her tour de force "Glitter and Be Gay" with operatic power, and acts it with the brassy humor of a musical stage comedian.  Morose that she has lost Candide, and dressing for two gentlemen who are keeping her, Cunegonde cheers herself by attaching jewels to her wrists, ears, neck, decolletage and head, until she resembles a chandelier.  Hauman hints at an underlying delicacy in the ever-coarsening Cunegonde that allows us to laugh at her and still recognize ourselves in her greed.  As Candide, Kenn Chester at first overplays the character's simplicity, making him more of an idiot than is necessary.  He is diminutive, with a lovely, light tenor, which makes for a sweeter Candide than the one on the famous original cast recording, Robert Rounseville.  His performance grows richer throughout the evening.

Nancy Dussault is salty, wise and lovably corrupt as the Old Lady, who helps Cunegonde make her way as a kept woman.  She is fine in two comic songs of dissolution, "I Am Easily Assimilated" and the very funny quartet of graft "What's the Use."  Musically, William Schallert makes a fairly wan Pangloss.  His "The Best of All Possible Worlds," an important number early on, lacks energy.  He has a paternal and warm presence, which takes some of the bite out of Pangloss, a character whose inane optimism has a natural relevance to certain new age spirituality.

Unfortunately, the set and projections, designed by Peter Wexler, are unattractive.  While the scenes change from Lisbon to Paris to Buenos Aires, the background remains the same: a semi-circular frame made up of six balconied windows.  The cramped balconies remain pure Holiday Inn under various lights and projections.  The show hits a visual grace note only at the top of Act II, which finds Candide in a balloon that is unable to take off due to the weight of his momentary riches.  He lightens the balloon by throwing out one golden sheep after another, while singing the beautiful "Ballad of Eldorado."

Along with the other marvelous songs, particularly the quartet that ends Act I, and "My Love," the misogynist's wooing song (well sung by a somewhat cheesy tenor Roland Rusinek), the score is a jewel and should be heard live at all costs.  Few musicals have boasted as many versions and as many authors of book and lyric — a helpful essay in the program sorts them all out.  Davidson's version is uneven but occasionally dazzling.  In the end, it lifts you up and sends you out with the best of all possible feelings.

Opera Everywhere: Music Center's Candide

Will Candide, that gloriously exasperating opera / operetta / musical / whatever, the product of so many gifted and mismatched pens, ever be finished?  We thought the question had been answered definitively in December 1989 when an ailing but still life-affirming Leonard Bernstein conducted and recorded a concert version in London for Deutsche Grammophon, and a critical edition of the score was issued.  Candide became a work for the ages, etched in stone.  Or so we thought.  But this show — witty, troubling, bawdy, profound, frivolous, thoughtful entertainment, and polemic all rolled into one creaking, unwieldy structure — continued to invite revision.

The temptation to remake the score yet again struck Gordon Davidson, the stage director and impresario who has been a dominant presence on the Los Angeles theater scene since the 60s and who was one of Candide's earliest revivalists and tinkerers.  While not the ideal solution, Davidson's latest take, which opened at the Music Center's newly rebuilt Ahmanson Theatre late last year, was emphatically an improvement over Harold Prince's whiz-bang "opera house version" seen here during New York City Opera's visits in 1982 and 1987.  Based on John Mauceri's Scottish Opera version (which comes closest to the Bernstein performance), Davidson's new production gives us more of Bernstein's serious intent, more of the exuberant cynicism of Voltaire's original, more music than had ever been heard in a major production here, and a portside political slant that early collaborator Lillian Hellman would have loved.  Davidson's 1966 Candide at UCLA was the only one to include Hellman's satire on the House un-American Activities Committee in the Lisbon scene and here it was again at last — still funny and tough and sharp as a tack.  Amazingly, the 1995 audience got the point.  Pangloss's interpolated line, "We need a lawyer; in fact, we need a team" resonated in O town, and the Cardinal Archbishop and the Jew were converted into stand-ins for Clarence Thomas and Bob Packwood ("Save your bragging for your diary, Senator").  We also heard a nifty number that hasn't make it onto any of the recordings so far, "Ringaroundarosy", with rapid WS Gilbertian wordplay by Lenny himself.

Yet Davidson could not weld this work's wild shifts in tone and idiom into a whole ball of wax, despite the smooth physical transitions within a gray, all-purpose set of Westphalian apartments.  Nor could he make us care about its lead characters, even though the composer obviously cared passionately, through his music.  The bubbling taste of the overture was delayed and diluted with a tedious prologue before the curtain, in which partying socialites (possibly mocking the black-tie opening night audience) are greeted by a Storyteller who then disappears for most of the evening.  All was slapstick frivolity in Westphalia (a la Prince) until the invading hordes suddenly plunged us into the pathos of "Candide's Lament" without any preparation; "The Ballad of Eldorado", a heartbreakingly beautiful, idealistic song, was spoiled by laughter generated by sight gags.

As Dr. Pangloss/Martin/Storyteller, veteran actor William Schallert exuded some professorial charm at first, talking and singing Pangloss's numbers in a vaguely Germanic accent, but he made laborious work of the patter in his Act Two numbers.  Constance Hauman's lovely coloratura has darkened and flutters more than it did when she was a rising regular attraction at Long Beach Opera a decade ago; but she's got Cunegonde down just right — flirtatious, spoiled, yet not too silly — and still punches out "Glitter and Be Gay" with show-stopping high notes and knowing mockery.  Nancy Dussault resisted the temptation to over-camp the Old Lady, while giving "I Am Easily Assimilated" enough bright-voiced Broadway pizazz.  Kenn Chester was a sturdy, naive young sap of a Candide, Roland Rusinek was a youthful, slightly nasal but sufficiently oily Governor, while Sean Smith's resonant Maximilian sported the best male voice in the cast.

Conductor Lucas Richman, who once impressed Bernstein himself in the latter's LA master classes, propelled things along gracefully at a moderate pace, with a good if pint-sized pit band in gear.  Yet this Candide never really achieved liftoff.  Much of Act Two lacked sparkle, and the serious dialog toward the end seemed yawningly protracted.  In the end, Candide may be better off heard than seen.