<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <docID>339286</docID> <postdate>2025-02-28 12:08:53</postdate> <headline>Opera of slapstick, burlesque and horseplay</headline> <body><p><img class="size-full wp-image-339264" src="https://citynews.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Candide-cast.jpg" alt="" width="900" height="600" /></p> <caption>Candide cast bottom left, Lyndon Watts as Candide. Photo: Carlita Sari</caption> <p><span class="kicker-line">Opera / Candide, Sydney Opera House until March 14. Reviewed by<strong> HELEN MUSA</strong>.</span></p> <p><strong>“Dying is easy; comedy is hard,†legendary English actor Edmund Kean is reputed to have said, and when you're confronted by a whole company working their individual socks off to be hilarious, you know what he meant. </strong></p> <p>For this much-lauded restaging of Victorian Opera’s production of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide by Opera Australia didn't land for me.</p> <p>It’s a distinctive work with a particular brand of zany satire drawn from the original novel by Voltaire – way ahead of its time – augmented with lyrics by Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim, John La Touche, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker and Bernstein himself.</p> <p>With a classic picaresque plot that takes the characters all over the globe, the production was so busy lampooning church, state, morality and even human relations that it was hard to find any warmth in the protagonists’ relationships, least of all between the innocent Candide (his name means simplicity itself) and the initially lovely (but increasingly less so) lady love, Cunegonde.</p> <p>Directed by Dean Bryant, it is strategically set by designer Dann Barber on an early-20th century caravan that serves, with appropriate props, as, among others, the kingdom of Westphalia, Lisbon, Cadiz, Venice and the fabled city of El Dorado.</p> <p>Barber’s costumes are spectacular, especially those for the female characters, with froth and tulle laid over the bare bones of their crinolines, gradually unveiled as the characters are laid low.</p> <p>The caravan convention is a way around the impossibility of achieving multiple scene changes, but nearly comes adrift during the sea voyages and is abandoned for the finale of the show – Make Your Garden Grow – when the full company comes downstage and sings straight out.</p> <p><img class=" wp-image-339263" src="https://citynews.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Annie-Aitken-as-Cunegonde.-Photo-Carlita-Sari.jpg" alt="" width="746" height="497" /></p> <caption>Annie Aitken as Cunegonde. Photo: Carlita Sari</caption> <p>But even that magnificence is almost destroyed as the cast plant fake flowers in the soil poured out of garden store bags while Candide and Cunegonde produce a doll/fake baby as a sign of fecundity, ending the show.</p> <p>Central to Candide is the protagonist’s perennially optimistic tutor Professor Pangloss (probably Voltaire himself), played in a camped-up style by Eddie Perfect in such an exaggerated way as to be occasionally inaudible, a worry, as we needed to hear his rose-tinted views of the world from beginning to end.</p> <p>The Panglossian philosophy, accepted boots and all by the naive Candide at the beginning, is not going over so well by the conclusion.</p> <p>Candide is played gently but convincingly by Lyndon Watts, hampered by a ridiculous pair of a giant curved Turkish slippers which impede his progress until he abandons them for the finale.</p> <p>As Cunegonde, Annie Aitken brought the house down for her coloratura show-stopper, Glitter and Be Gay, but fails to develop as her character’s wordly condition deteriorates.</p> <p>Brett Weymark conducted the show in a mild way and the music rarely took off, with Bernstein’s beautiful overture in particular toned down, so that it was only in the finale, when at last the strangely-costumed chorus was allowed to come downstage, that the full brilliance of Bernstein’s music was heard.</p> <p>But with slapstick and burlesque to the fore, it was less the music that got the applause than the horseplay. Perhaps that was the idea.</p> </body>