Candide Goodman Theatre
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Mary Zimmerman’s new production for the Goodman Theatre isn’t a total triumph, but it comes far closer to reaching El Dorado than any of the seven Candides I’ve encountered so far. Her adaptation draws substantially on Voltaire’s book, fusing cutting comedy with philosophical gravity. She captures the wonderful simplicity of Voltaire’s writing—which recounts the characters’ atrocious sufferings with deadpan irony—and gives new clarity to the songs’ witty lyrics.
Candide was conceived by Bernstein and Lillian Hellman in 1953 as a satire on McCarthyism. Blacklisted by Hollywood for her leftist sympathies, Hellman saw Voltaire’s depiction of the Catholic Inquisition’s brutal pursuit of heretics as a metaphor for the anticommunist witch hunts of her own time. For Bernstein, the book additionally represented an opportunity to compose what he later called a “love letter to European music”—a stretch for a composer best known for his modernist, jazz-influenced scores for ballet (Fancy Free), Broadway (On the Town and Wonderful Town), and film (On the Waterfront).
Zimmerman spreads the storytelling duties among her 19-member ensemble rather than hand them all over to Panglosss, as others have. But the philosopher—portrayed with sweet befuddlement by Larry Yando—is still an essential character here, insistently championing his optimistic worldview even as he’s being hanged as a heretic, manning an oar as a slave on a Turkish ship, or losing his nose to syphilis. Zimmerman gives equal weight, though, to Pangloss’s opposite number, the cynic Martin (a deliciously sour Tom Aulino).
