In staging his 1974 musical version of Candide, director Hal Prince completely tore apart and re-arranged a New York theater in order that the show could take place on all sides of the audience. The current Loeb production does not quite secreate Prince's arena, since director George Hamlin felt it would inhibit the view of some parts of the audience in several scenes. But Derek McLane, the set designer, has replaced a number of seats with a huge pit, in which the audience sits on benches and on the floor, and has also created a number of platforms connected by ramps. To label Candide a musical seems inadequate; to term it "theatrical carnival" is more accurate.
The design is not just an innovative gimmick: it adds a crucial element of fun--something that the musical in its original version lacked. A production in the 1950s boasted a book by Lillian Hellman, lyrics Richard Wilbur, and music by Leonard Bernstein. But its cynical, pompous tone was almost totally out of touch with that of Voltaire's novel, a satiric classic that describes how a young innocent named Candide, whose tutor has taught him to believe this "the best of all possible world1," experiences an interminable and hysterical series of disasters that teach him to view life a bit more realistically. To reproduce the Voltairian spirit. Prince engaged Hugh Wheeler (A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd) to re-write the book and Stephen Sondheim (ditto) to furnish some additional lyrics. He also "cast young" in-order to convey the naivete the original production lacked. The Loeb version has added a few direct confrontations between Candide and Voltaire, in which the character and his creator discuss the manifestations of God's will in the world: this dialogue prevents the musical from becoming a mindless circus.
Candide is an enormous and exhausting show. The score, which contains a couple dozen numbers, frequently demands operatic voices; the chorus of twenty-odd people change costumes roughly five times apiece to portray seventy-eight characters. The most demanding role is that of the narrator-ringmaster, who appears in five different guises, including Voltaire himself. Some of actor William Falk's lines had to be recorded to allow him time to race around the stage and transform himself into another character. Falk seems to be able to handle the various singing styles and characterizations, but the costume changes at times overwhelm him. Right: The Cilbert and Sullivan Players continue their production of "Princess Ida" this weekend at Agassiz. Below: Voltaire's comedy "Candide" goes up tonight at the Loeb Mainstage. especially the eighteenth-century wigs. Sometimes, he admits, it's "hard to figure out where I left my head."
For a while, it was hard to figure out where the cast of Tommy left their show. As we go to press, the place seems to be Currier House, where the show originated. The production, based on the opera by Peter Townsend of The Who, is about a youth who goes deaf, dumb, and blind after witnessing his mother's infidelity; eventually he finds his callin as a pinball player extrordinaire. It's all laden with heavy Christ symbolism.
This Tommy will not possess the likes of Elton John or Tina Turner. But it does contain a corps of trained dancers, some professional or pre-professional. In one six-minute number. they perform a hybrid of jazz and ballet combinations choreographed to vintage rock music. Tommy also boasts some sophisticated multimedia effects; obviously, the show demands that attention be paid to sound and lighting. We sincerely hope the change of scene hasn't irrepairably disrupted the production, and that the show opens with enthusiasm and expertise undiminished.
The performers of the title roles in the production of Romeo and Juliet at the Hasty Pudding Theater devote their energies to making noises, but they're not Shakespeare's. Walter C. Hughes's Romeo has good looks but no ear for the verse in the play, so he sobs a lot. Shannon Gaughan's Juliet is only slightly better; she varies the noises emanating from the stage by introducing several whines. They do this production in Shirley Wilber as Juliet's nurse seems to be the only performer with some sense of how to present this play. Romeo and Juliet argues for the power of words to create something out of nothing, but these performers don't pay their lines enough attention to give Shakespeare's words a chance.
By contrast, spectacle abounds in Princess Ida, the spring operetta offering of the Gilbert and Sullivan Players. Aside from the Hasty Pudding musical, the operetta has the largest budget of any student production, and the shows usually show it. I op notch voices are frequently displayed as well.
The plot is typical Gilbert and Sullivan--complex, nonsensical, and irrelevant. The princess of the title flees her palace to avoid marrying a prince pre-chosen for her. She establishes a school for young ladies, dedicated to the disliking of men. The school is literally shut away from male society by a wall that encloses the grounds. But the royal finance, in search of his princess, manages to enter the school--disguised as a girl. The women's academy setting loosely ties the production into the Radcliffe centennial, reportedly one of G & S's reasons for mounting the show this year. Though one of Gilbert's and Sullivan's lesser-known operettas, many scholars consider the score one of the duo's finest.
British wit also characterizes the Dunster House production of Shaw's Heartbreak House. Though not lacking in Shavian verbal cleverness, this play is atypical Shaw in certain ways. It abounds in action, making it less talkative than Man and Superman or Saint Joan. The characters are more three-dimensional and very finely drawn; they espouse philosophies, instead of embodying them, as is so often the case with Shavian types. Often, in fact, they seem to echo characters of other plays by Shaw, only they turn out not to be what they seem. This motif runs through Heartbreak House.
Written late in Shaw's career, Heartbreak House unfolds against the backdrop of World War 1. It opens almost like an Agatha Christie murder mystery: a young girl, accompanied her finance and father, comes to a strange country house, invited by a woman she doesn't know all that well. The house is bulging with a variety of guests, to who terms like "wacky" and "zany" cannot be too strongly applied. A burglar enters the premises, as does the long-lost daughter of one of the guests. Relationships among the characters are tangled--nobody is quite what he appears to be. Eventually the knots become antangled, in revelations amusing to the audience but painful for the characters-- heartbreaking, in fact.
The background of World War 1--a conflict whose cataclysmic effects were very much realized by its contemporaries--has caused some critics to feel that the weird household represents the disintegrating pre-war society in microcosm. In the sense that the play portrays a group of people, suspended and enclosed while their world slips away from them. Hearbreak House resembles the works of Anton Chekov. In the play's preface, Shaw expresses the desire to write "a fantasia in the Russian manner." A mixture of mystery and melancholy, Hearbreak House could be described as something of a cross between Agatha Christie and Chekhov.
Today regarded as an American musical classic, Lerner and Lowe's Camelot met with a less-than-enthusiastic reception from critics when it originally opened. They dismissed the Lerner show as being inferior to My Fair Lady, its immediate predecessor by the same composer-lyricist team. The comparison irritated Lerner, who pointed out that he and Lowe had had hits before My Fair Lady, such as Brigadoon.
The comparison probably also would not sit well with Will Sakas, director of the Freshman Arts Council's production of Camelot. Sakas, who proposed the show to the Council, loves the musical for its dramatic content: the tragic love story and struggle to create a civilization in the midst of the Dark Ages, Camelot is, in his opinion, "a very beautiful, very personal tragedy."
The director read and re-read material on King Arthur and the Round Table, including The Once and Future King, which was Lerner's immediate source for the musical. As a result, Sakas will present a Camelot stressing the figure of the king in the dual guises of man and monarch. Although turning points in the show come when Arthur must choose between his desires and his ideals, Sakas believes Arthur's fate, like that of most tragic heroes is already determined at the opening of the play. Such a view reinforces the interpretation of Camelot as a musical tragedy.
Most importantly, Sakas has eliminated many of the show's spectacular scenes, including several processional marches and court scenes.
Marches and elaborate sets only distract from the flow of the musical and the concentration on Arthur's story, and Sakas wants no distractions in this production. "We want it to hit home to people," he says.
