Opera
In Victorian Opera’s ocker production, Leonard Bernstein’s ebullient Candide is rendered as a queer shaggy dog story. By Ben Brooker.
Victorian Opera’s Candide
Leonard Bernstein is, as they say, having a moment. In 2018, lavish celebrations marked the American composer-conductor’s 100th birthday, and last year yielded Bradley Cooper’s gritty but worshipful biopic, Maestro. The latter – a considerable success for Netflix despite occasioning the most infamous prosthetic proboscis since Nicole Kidman’s turn in The Hours – is in contention for seven Oscars. Bernstein remains a cultural force, “venerated”, as music critic Alex Ross recently put it, “as the Great Communicator, who thrust the symphonic repertory into the national conversation”.
This year Australian audiences will receive two main-stage productions of Bernstein’s Candide alone, the first from Victorian Opera under new artistic director Stuart Maunder and the second at the State Theatre Company of South Australia in May.
Known primarily for its jaunty overture, Candide is a curious beast, a comic operetta in the vein of Gilbert and Sullivan based on Voltaire’s satirical 1759 novel of the same name. It has been revised repeatedly since its disastrous 1956 Broadway premiere. Bernstein didn’t settle on a final version – the one most often performed today – until shortly before his death.
Notwithstanding some memorable songs – the best of which demonstrate Bernstein’s masterful use of dissonance, propulsive offbeat rhythms and florid melodising – one wonders why the maestro should have been so exercised with reworking Candide. Early critics singled out Lillian Hellman’s book for its seriousness, but in the final version it sometimes feels so slight as to almost vanish while you’re watching it. How we receive the work in 2024 is further complicated by its racial stereotypes and rape jokes.
Director Dean Bryant’s solution to these problems is largely to pretend they don’t exist, thrusting the work – as with Opera Australia’s current production of The Magic Flute (reviewed in these pages last week) – into an unapologetically ocker milieu. The Westphalian “castle” on which the operetta opens is a begrimed vintage caravan, with Dann Barber’s design making clever use of detritus and cast-offs. The cast is dressed in a kind of exaggerated Regency style: distressed frockcoats, breeches and chemise dresses intermingling with cowboy boots and exposed bustles. Various shades of pink and purple dominate the work’s colour palette as the caravan disassembles into one micro-set after another, often ingeniously extending upwards via a sort of retractable scaffold. The broad accents and camp aesthetic evoke a certain strain of nostalgic, tongue-in-cheek Australiana: think the early films of Baz Luhrmann and Stephan Elliott with a pinch of Kath Day-Knight.
It’s an undoubtedly fun concept, reframing Candide’s picaresque misadventures as a sort of queered Australian shaggy dog story. As the action meanders from one exotic locale to another – Lisbon, Paris, Buenos Aires – wooden plaques are added to the caravan while postcard-style “greetings from…” banners are raised above it. Everything is done, as per Susan Sontag’s famous definition of camp, in quotation marks, down to meta-theatrical interventions by stagehands and the way the work’s oft-performed aria, “Glitter and Be Gay”, is turned into a piss-take of showboating sopranos.
The operetta’s plot – a parody of the adventure and romance tropes common to the bildungsroman of Voltaire’s day – resists summary. Broadly, Candide (Lyndon Watts), the illegitimate nephew of Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh, is to marry Cunégonde (Katherine Allen), but war breaks out between Westphalia and Hesse. Westphalia is destroyed and Cunégonde seemingly killed, and Candide, accompanied by a rogues’ gallery of foes and allies, sets out on a journey partly inspired by the teachings of the irrepressibly optimistic Dr Pangloss (Eddie Perfect), whose doctrine states everything that happens is for the best.
What follows is an increasingly improbable series of events and coincidences – natural disasters, shark attacks, shipwrecks, duels and the repeated reuniting of characters thought lost or dead – culminating in Candide’s disillusionment and, finally, his marriage to Cunégonde. Voltaire (also played by Perfect) narrates the story as it veers from one misfortune to the next.
As with the novel on which it’s based, Candide skewers multiple targets as it goes along: the church and the nation-state, philosophical dogmatism and the hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie. The absurdity of war and the misguidedness of optimism in the face of life’s brutalising realities emerge from the veil of comedy as serious themes. But the operetta is more a vehicle for Bernstein’s effervescent score than Voltaire’s bitter social commentary. After all, what was scandalous in Voltaire’s day – and even in Bernstein’s for that matter – is hardly confronting now.
Wisely, Bryant’s production does not attempt to convince us otherwise. Everything is played winkingly and for laughs. It’s an approach that works, for the most part, even if it risks a tonal sameness and has the effect of draining the operetta’s more reflective numbers – the gorgeous “Candide’s Lament” and the concluding “Make Our Garden Grow”, to name two – of some of their poignancy.
Mostly drawn from musical theatre rather than opera, the cast is uniformly strong. Fresh from a career-making role in Hamilton, tenor Lyndon Watts is ideal as the callow, simpering title character. His voice, while occasionally lacking in strength, is expressive and pellucid. Perfect, also a tenor, is engaging in the dual role of Pangloss and Voltaire, imbuing the latter with a kind of vaudevillian flair that complements the Palais Theatre’s historic setting. Musical theatre stalwarts Maria Mercedes and Eddie Muliaumaseali’i are superb in the minor roles of Old Lady and Cacambo, while younger cast members Euan Fistrovic Doidge and Melanie Bird, as Maximilian and Paquette respectively, are suitably over the top. In a variety of often outrageously accented roles, Alexander Lewis and Troy Sussman round out the ensemble.
It is, however, soprano Katherine Allen – who appeared as Paquette in a semi-staged 2018 production at the Sydney Opera House – who steals the show as Cunégonde. It is the work’s most demanding role – the intricate coloratura aria “Glitter and Be Gay” is challenging enough on its own with its high E-flats, Cs and D-flats – and Allen makes it look almost effortless. To do so while maintaining the song’s satirical tone and performing Freya List’s complex, prop-heavy choreography is all the more remarkable.
Under the baton of Benjamin Northey, Orchestra Victoria is mostly equal to the dynamism of Bernstein’s score, and has a starring role, visible onstage throughout rather than confined to the pit. The 16-strong chorus, bedecked in everything from burlesque-style pantsuits to gold sequins, is in fine voice.
Still, one is left wondering: why, after a long absence from Australian stages, the flurry of Candide now? Perhaps, like Bernstein himself, directors are drawn to the challenge of redeeming such a tortured and problematic work. Or maybe it’s just the tunes: ebullient and mocking, both an escape from and a riposte to these dark times.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 17, 2024 as "Glittering camp".
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