Preview: Collaboration Key To CBT/KSO’s ‘Candide’

 

It’s a bit ironic that Voltaire’s Candide, a novella that satirizes the 18th Century philosophy of optimism and its inevitable disillusionment, has required plenty of optimism and perseverance from those that have sought to turn it into musical theatre. Composer Leonard Bernstein began his Candide journey with a 1956 Broadway production, first conceived by playwright Lillian Hellman, that was notable for its music score but was roundly criticized for an inadequate libretto. That 1956 production ran for only 73 performances, the very definition of a critical and commercial failure.

However, with the brilliant Bernstein score as its attraction, others made attempts at Candide over the next three decades, starting with director Hal Prince who enlisted collaborators such as Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim. With each attempt, Bernstein, who had not been participating in these continual revisions, was rather open in expressing his displeasure with them, insisting, often futilely, that the basics of his score should drive revisions in the book. Not surprising, even with a list of librettists that read like a Who’s Who of musical theatre, these revisions generally fell short, the libretto drifting nebulously, doing theatrical justice to neither Bernstein nor Voltaire.

One such attempt was a production by the Scottish Opera under John Mauceri in 1988 that absorbed many of Bernstein’s desires for a reworking. Using the revisions of that production, the composer then made his own alterations to the score—a re-orchestration as well as changes that ranged from tweaks to restoration of previously removed music—in what he termed his “final revised version.”

With Bernstein and his music being celebrated this year—the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth—productions of Candide have been popping up in all corners of globe, most generally employing some variation of the “Scottish Opera” version. That is also the case with a joint production of Candide by the Clarence Brown Theatre and the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra that opens this Friday, August 31.

Directed by CBT Artistic Director Calvin MacLean along with co-director James Marvel of the UT Opera Theatre, the production incorporates the KSO under Maestro Aram Demirjian in a staging scheme that includes a 36-member orchestra. This will be the third such collaboration by the two organizations—a collaboration first conceived in 2008 that resulted in productions of Amadeus in 2010 and Sweeney Todd in 2012.

Clearly, every company and every director that attempts a production of Candide does so with some degree of trepidation—and MacLean is no exception.

“I’ve always wanted to do Candide,” states MacLean, “largely because of the music, but also because of the challenge. I like works that offer a challenge, or that are particularly difficult in some way or another. And, Candide was a big challenge…The music is tremendous—the book is problematic.”

“Candide’s history of revisions represents an attempt to reconcile one particular view of the world and artistic expression with another view of the world two centuries later. And those various adaptations have struggled with those shifts in mood. They’ve struggled with the differences between  Voltaire, a writer who looks at things with a great deal of skepticism and sarcasm, to another writer who looks at things with a great deal of humanity and empathy and passion. Trying to reconcile those two voices make the production both powerful and challenging.”

Equally challenging for MacLean and the production team was finding a scenic avenue through Candide that includes an orchestra, not in an orchestra pit, but onstage integrated into the dramatic action.

“The scene designer, Michael Ganio, started with the orchestra. We talked about wanting to do something different than what we had done either for Amadeus or Sweeney Todd,” explains MacLean. “We’ve placed the orchestra rather prominently in kind of an arc around the conductor. The action happens in, around, and in front of the orchestra. But, the communication between orchestra and singers is a challenge—how do you give up a certain amount of scenic space where the major element of your visual design is an orchestra?”

Taking the orchestra’s point of view in this collaboration is KSO music director Aram Demirjian, who has inherited the role of taking the third of three productions with the CBT to the stage.

“Once I was appointed music director,” explains Demirjian, “…one of the first conversations I had was with Rachel Ford [KSO executive director] and Calvin MacLean where they presented the idea of the collaboration. My response was—when do we start?”

 

Like MacLean, Demirjian sees the revision history of Candide as a delicious challenge that requires a multitude of decisions.

“What we think of as Candide today,” offers Demirjian, “bears little resemblance to the original 1956 production that featured a libretto by Lillian Hellman. It has been revised so many times in different contexts, whether for the Broadway stage or for concert performances. Each subsequent production sort of took on the personalities of the people involved in it.”

“We gravitated toward using the 1988 Scottish Opera version because it was, in a way, Bernstein’s final word on the show—the last version of it that he touched. Actually, it was the only version that he ever conducted. And, it was the version that he had the strongest hand in orchestrating. He was doing it with more of an operatic sound in mind. The staging is not going to exude ‘grand opera’ but it uses a bigger orchestra than any of the other versions. There is a richness and emotional impact in the orchestration that I find to be very true to Bernstein that is lacking in the previous versions.”

In many ways, though, placing the orchestra on stage with the action, as was done with the previous Amadeus and Sweeney Todd, injects an entirely different dynamic into this Candide production.

“The idea of these two groups of people—the cast and the orchestra—the symbolic idea of them surrounding each other on stage is very exciting. Certainly, it presents challenges of sight lines, and things like that that, that you wouldn’t have with an orchestra in the pit. Cal and I think a scenic setup like this is more true to the spirit of Candide, because music and action are so, so closely intertwined in this show. I think it will further illuminate the action in the storytelling for the audience to see the physicality of the orchestra. The orchestra really helps tell the story.”

A third partner in the collaboration of CBT and KSO for producing Candide has been the Roy Cockrum Foundation that has made a substantial grant to both organizations making the production possible at the scale to which it was conceived.

Demirjian offers: “We would not be able to do a Candide production that would do justice to the show itself and to the two organizations without the incredible grant that the Roy Cockrum Foundation gave us. While we talk about this as a collaboration between KSO and CBT, it’s really three organizations coming together to make this happen.”

Demirjian also feels that collaborations such as this have important residual effects.

“There is this incredible diversity of experience in the production—singers trained in opera, music theatre professionals, students, and straight theatre specialists. And, you have Cal and his team; you’ve got me coming at it from the musical side. There’s this really wonderful exchange of ideas happening.”

“This production is all about collaboration—and that spirit of collaboration makes the production stronger. I think it is a model for just how strong the artistic community is in Knoxville when our different institutions are working together.”