“Candide” – tragedy with a smile at Long Beach Opera
Robin Buck as Voltaire/Doctor Pangloss and Danielle Marcelle Bond as Paquette. Photo by Keith Ian Polakoff. Clowning around with “Candide” Composed in the mid-1950s and fussed over during the remaining decades before his death in 1990, Leonard Bernstein’s handling of Voltaire’s 18th century novella (“a comic vision of disaster” is how Matthew Hodgart phrased it) is quite a romp, and perhaps more so in David Schweizer’s staging of it for Long Beach Opera (LBO). There was one performance last week and there are two more coming up real quick this Saturday afternoon and evening. Voltaire set out to satirize the notion (being bandied about at the time by Leibniz and his followers) that ours is the best of all possible worlds and the best of all possible times. However, wars, religious persecution, and natural catastrophe, such as the earthquake that leveled Lisbon, seemed to point in the other direction. So, Leibniz was morphed into Doctor Pangloss (Robin Buck) and his students fed a pablum that started them off on life’s big adventure but on the wrong foot. “Candide,” then, is something of a coming-of-age story, with the title character (Todd Strange) a bit like Pinocchio or Baron…
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