[In the following review, Lahr gives a negative assessment of a revival of Candide, calling it degenerative from the onset and slow-moving. He also finds that the musical possesses an incoherence of orchestration and score.]

Nobody can say that Voltaire didn't suffer for his wit. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for apparently spoofing the Regent, throttled by a courtier's henchman for his ridicule, and exiled from Paris for his acid thoughts about church and state. In the course of three weeks in 1758, at the age of sixty-four, he wrote his picaresque novella Candide; or, Optimism, which was a belly laugh at the Enlightenment notion of a harmonious Christian universe. Now, in Hal Prince's revival of the revival of the revised Leonard Bernstein–Lillian Hellman–Richard Wilbur 1956 musical version of Candide (at the Gershwin), we are made to suffer for Voltaire's wit.

The musical Candide is against every “ism” except commercialism. Here spectacle substitutes for satire. The drama of the musical is not the expense of Candide's spirit but the spirit of Candide's expense. The massive two-thousand-seat auditorium is turned into a gaudy carnival sideshow: the walls of the orchestra are filled with painted panels of Candide's adventures and of the continents that the credulous, lovelorn hero travels in pursuit of his beloved, the frequently raped Cunegonde. The set, designed by Clarke Dunham in hues of muted blue, red, green, and crimson, is itself a huge, ugly hodgepodge of carnival clutter, dominated by a fairground sign propped up on candy-cane poles and broadcasting “Dr. Voltaire's Freaks and Wonders”; in the foreground, on both sides of the stage, are double-decker carnival wagons, one of which houses a calliope that turns out, significantly, to produce no sound. In the background, a cardboard public leans forward in its seats as if at a tent show and stares out into mostly unutilized space.

Candide begins well enough, with the rambunctious elegance of Bernstein's wonderful overture, which he called a valentine to European music. The music holds out the promise of talent and caprice—a bold assertion of Bernstein's credo that “man's capacity for laughter is nobler than his divine gift of suffering.” Then two rearing pantomime horses appear and pull the overcostumed and overmiked cast into view. We are in the slaphappy world of burlesque, but without an iota of anarchy or inspiration. Voltaire himself is produced from another part of the show's rolling stock, and from almost the first beat of the first song, “Life Is Happiness Indeed,” Candide starts to wheeze like a party balloon deflating. The song itself, a journeyman job by Stephen Sondheim, who contributed a few other lacklustre numbers to the revised hokum, is meant to solve part of the problem of Voltaire's sprawling story by introducing the main characters with a wash of attitude. The lyric unwittingly acknowledges the show's cumbersome narrative problem. As the Old Lady (the expert Andrea Martin, who actually knows a laugh and how to get it) sings in her Polish accent:

Life is Happiness
—Or not—
Let's get goink vith the plot.

But it takes a long time to wind up this musical fun machine. Hugh Wheeler's dishevelled book—a revue disguised as a romp, with no emotional or thematic progression—focusses first on Voltaire and then on the Pollyannaish tutor Dr. Pangloss, and finally gets around to the eponymous hero, whom the late Wolcott Gibbs called in these pages “one of the great imbeciles in literature,” who “surely deserves all the dreadful things that happen to him.” A quarter of an hour passes before Candide's story actually gets under way, but by then the audience hardly cares. The Old Lady turns out to be prophetic. “I'm no singer, but I ask you,” she sings at the opening, “When the story's getting boring / Who'll be coming to the rescue?” In this production, the answer is the producer, Garth Drabinsky, who is the deep-pocketed chairman of Livent, Inc. The show makes speed the correlative of Voltaire's giddy disenchantment: Prince and Drabinsky—the general and his treasury—send their recostumed cast into scene after scene, like foot soldiers into the trenches, trying to overwhelm the audience with bigger and bigger effects.

Voltaire's joke is about man's capacity for denial. Candide clings to the belief that this is “the best of all possible worlds” and “everything will turn out right,” but he bears witness to greed, rape, corruption, and murder, some of it by his own hand. Candide doesn't see the barbarity in himself or in the world. Likewise, this production seems unaware that it has laid a Fabergé egg. It doesn't hear how the metallic sound of the orchestra muddies the scintillating humor of Bernstein's score; in its gargantuan ambition, the production doesn't even listen to the wisdom of its own script. “Never seek for greatness,” says Dr. Pangloss (Jim Dale, finally getting laughs at the end of the show, when, dressed like a swami, he is suspended by wires above the audience), “for the higher the aim the harder the fall.” The production drowns out personality. Candide (the fine-voiced Jason Danieley) makes his journey by sidling through the front row, where the audience gets up close but never personal with his character. As Cunegonde, Harolyn Blackwell shows more power in her big contralto than in her presence. In her comic aria “Glitter and Be Gay,” Bernstein's parody of the “Jewel Song” from Gounod's Faust, she rocks the audience with her coloratura, only to have the bravura singing dissipated by banal comic business as she clumsily filches her accompanist's jewels.

But not all the slapstick is so lame. “I Am Easily Assimilated” (a Carmen Miranda sendup written by Bernstein and his wife, Felicia) gets deliciously silly as Andrea Martin rumbas with New World peasants, who, once they are roused from their siesta and lift their sombreros, all look like members of ZZ Top. In the folderol department, Arte Johnson, a little comic who is large on charm, wins the prize. He brings oxygen to the struggling evening every time he is killed, goosed, or stabbed. His impish, seasoned presence allows him to make a real connection to the audience, who are grateful. And at the finale Bernstein's gorgeous hymn “Make Our Garden Grow” translates the skepticism of Voltaire's “Il faut cultiver son jardin” into a stunning C-major affirmation. Prince has the orchestra cut out, and the cast's thrilling, full-throated a-cappella voices resound:

We're neither pure nor wise nor good
We'll do the best we know
We'll build our house, and chop our wood
And make our garden grow,
And make our garden grow.

At the curtain call on opening night, Jim Dale stepped forward and asked the collaborators to join the cast onstage. This lap of honor seems to be de rigueur at Livent shows. One by one, the major players of the production team, led by Drabinsky himself, made their way from the audience to the stage, where they were high-fived, hugged, and applauded. It's a terrific thing to do when you have a hit, but it's unseemly when you have a miss.