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Candide

Published Thursday 26 June 2008 at 11:25 by Mark Shenton

After the fiasco of last year’s Kismet, ENO returns to surer musical theatre ground with the Leonard Bernstein-scored Candide.

Originally premiered on Broadway in 1956 - where it ran for barely two months - its two most recent London outings were respectively at the Old Vic in 1988 and National Theatre in 1999, but the piece has increasingly been finding a far happier home on operatic and concert stages. New York City Opera recently revived Hal Prince’s production, and it was done as the opening concert of last year’s Edinburgh International Festival.

In these settings, with the benefit of full orchestra and chorus, its ravishing score can be given full musical justice, but also its Peer Gynt-like story of a strenuous moral journey across continents that its title character goes on and the multiplying physical and personal disasters that he encounters along the way, doesn’t seem so out of place.

Stephen Sondheim, who contributed new lyrics in one of the many attempts to “fix” this famously troubled show, once said that a musical becomes an opera when it is done in an opera house in front of an opera audience. Robert Carsen’s new production duly works as such because that audience is better used to dealing with both its narrative extremes as well as the high-concept solution that the director provides, with his designer Michael Levine offering a giant fifties TV screen to literally frame it within.

It becomes at once a definably period piece, with references to the McCarthy era that it was partly written in response to, but Carsen’s constantly witty and inventive production also produces its own contemporary interpretative interventions, taking a credit with Ian Burton for “freely adapting” Hugh Wheeler’s original book to explicitly relocate it within the embrace of America from the fifties to the present day.

It may still the case that they are trying to fix the unfixable, and inevitably they occasionally go too far - the heart-renderingly beautiful optimism of the finale choral anthem, Make My Garden Grow, is undermined by being sung against video footage of yet more unfolding disasters where, thanks to global warming, that may be a forlorn hope rather than a promise.

But ENO has cast it splendidly, with Toby Spence and Anna Christy making an appealing (and gorgeously sung) pair as Candide and his lover Cunegonde respectively. Beverley Klein, returning to the role of Old Lady that she previously played in the National Theatre version, holds her own in operatic company, and Alex Jennings - who took over as Professor Higgins during the West End run of My Fair Lady - is a remarkably assured and accomplished musical actor as Voltaire and Pangloss.

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