In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I report on Mary Zimmerman’s new production of Candide–not very enthusiastically, I fear. Here’s an excerpt.
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Of all the great musicals, “Candide” poses the biggest problems to anyone who tries to stage it. It’s universally agreed that Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant operetta-style score is altogether worthy of Voltaire’s ferocious satire of 18th-century optimism, but the original 1956 Broadway production closed after 73 performances, mainly because of the heavy-handedness of Lillian Hellman’s book, and since then the show has been revised and rewritten repeatedly in an attempt to make it work. Now Mary Zimmerman, whose “Metamorphoses” hit big in 2002, has taken up the challenge, concocting a new version of “Candide” co-produced by Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C., where I saw it last week. I wish I could say that Ms. Zimmerman has finally cracked the “Candide” code, but her version, despite many memorable moments, fails once again to solve the problem of creating a convincing context for Bernstein’s miraculously effervescent music.
Ms. Zimmerman, like the vast majority of her predecessors, takes as a starting point Harold Prince’s successful 1974 Broadway revival of “Candide,” for which Hugh Wheeler wrote an all-new book that was undeniably effective but dismayingly vulgar. Eight years later Mr. Prince put together a longer “opera-house version” of the show for the New York City Opera, and in 1989 Bernstein himself recorded an even longer “final revised version” of the score with which subsequent directors have continued to tinker. This time around, Ms. Zimmerman has scrapped Wheeler’s dialogue, replacing much of it with speeches drawn directly from Voltaire’s novella, and has crammed in more of Bernstein’s revised score than any previous non-operatic stage version.
The result is a musical that runs for three hours and feels slow, especially in the second act, which sags badly in the middle. It doesn’t help that Ms. Zimmerman, like Wheeler before her, relies on a string of third-person narrators to advance the episodic plot, a device that slows the action to something in between a crawl and a waddle. The hectic staging–the actors are forever pushing around props and set pieces–fails to paper over the sluggish pacing…
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Read the whole thing here.

“Only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst.”
Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad : A Personal Remembrance

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• La Cage aux Folles (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Driving Miss Daisy * (drama, G, possible for smart children, extended through Apr. 9, reviewed here)

• A Free Man of Color (epic comedy, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)

• Lombardi (drama, G/PG-13, a modest amount of adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Merchant of Venice * (Shakespeare, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 9, reviewed here)

• Million Dollar Quartet (jukebox musical, G, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, closes Jan. 16, original Broadway production reviewed here)

• Angels in America (drama, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, extended through Mar. 27, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Play Dead (theatrical spook show, PG-13, utterly unsuitable for easily frightened children or adults, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN MADISON, N.J.:

• I Capture the Castle (comedy, G/PG-13, suitable for unusually precocious children, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Oklahoma! (musical, G, suitable for children, closes Dec. 30, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON ON BROADWAY:

• Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (musical, PG-13/R, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• Fela! (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

• The Pee-wee Herman Show (comic revue, G/PG-13, heavily larded with double entendres, closes Jan. 2, reviewed here)

“To him boredom was a tragedy, for he had no more realization than if he had been an animal that any state he was in would ever come to an end.”
Rebecca West, The Thinking Reed

An extremely rare kinescope of the Hallmark Hall of Fame TV adaptation of The Fantasticks, directed by George Schaefer and starring Bert Lahr, Ricardo Montalban, and Stanley Holloway, originally telecast by NBC on Oct. 18, 1964 and never shown again. This print also includes the original commercials:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“The rightness of a thing isn’t determined by the amount of courage it takes.”
Mary Renault, The Charioteer

“The novelist of manners must be more interested in other people than in himself, and that, unfortunately, is not often found in the places where ostensibly ‘serious’ fiction is now written.”
Jonathan Yardley, “Bard of the Upper Crust” (Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2010)