Portland, OR. (North America).(Consul, Candide)

Light played tricks on the eyes in Candide, Portland Opera's season finale (seen May 11). On a bare stage, Jerome Sirlin's lighted projections flung audiences from a Bulgarian battlefield to a stomach-churning ship at sea, and from the splendor of a Renaissance cathedral to a bawdy Venetian gambling casino. Candide was Leonard Bernstein's parody of parodies, and Sirlin's sets brought to life each of the work's extravagant locations. Directed with a nimble touch by Christopher Mattaliano, the production skipped around the best of all possible worlds with a strong cast and agile orchestra.

Both of Portland Opera's spring productions originally opened on Broadway in the 1950s. Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul triumphed in 1950 [see OPERA NEWS online, Aug. 2002], while Candide bombed six years later. The age of McCarthyism cried out for caricature, and Lillian Hellman, who admired "the dash, the speed, the roaring-river quality" of Voltaire's attacks on the Age of Enlightenment, seemed an appropriate partner. But her words--and those of Dorothy Parker, Richard Wilbur and Stephen Sondheim--labor against the stream of tunes that Bernstein unleashed. Candide is the rare Broadway score in which Bernstein did not use jazz, but he employed just about everything else: tangos, spoofs of eighteenth-century ensembles, grand-opera choruses and a bravura "jewel" song for the soprano, "Glitter and Be Gay." Candide begins with the greatest overture of the twentieth century, and the orchestra dashed it off winningly. Conductor Michael ...