Candide (Opera)

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    In Vienna, the Adventures of ‘Candide’ Continue

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    On the heels of the new film “Maestro,” an American director will stage Leonard Bernstein’s often-reworked operetta in its “concert version.”The production history of “Candide,” Leonard Bernstein’s operetta based on Voltaire’s novel, is as epic as the highs and lows of its title character’s journey in a volatile and menacing world. From its infamously unsuccessful Broadway debut in 1956 to its various revisions for opera houses, theaters and concert halls around the world, “Candide” may be as complicated as it is beloved.Matthew Newlin plays Candide and Nikola Hillebrand plays Cunegonde in the production.David Payr for The New York TimesThe MusikTheater an der Wien, in Vienna, is among the latest companies to take on “Candide.” Starting next month, it will perform the so-called concert version, first staged in 1989 at the Barbican Center in London. This version uses a narrator, much like Voltaire’s satirical 1759 tale, to guide the topsy-turvy story of Candide, an innocent and perpetually optimistic young man — and the characters he encounters along the way, including Cunegonde, his love interest, and the bumbling Dr. Pangloss — in the aftermath of a version of the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755.This “Candide,” running for nine performances from Jan. 17 to Feb. 3, also arrives on the heels of “Maestro,” a new film directed by Bradley Cooper, who also portrays Bernstein at his zenith as both composer and conductor. For many of the people involved with the operetta in Vienna, a city where he is still held in high esteem — a street was named for him in 1995, five years after his death — it is a fitting moment to celebrate a composer and his work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Franne Lee, Tony Winner Who Also Costumed Coneheads, Dies at 81

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      She worked on “Sweeney Todd” and “Candide” and also on the early seasons of “Saturday Night Live,” contributing to the look of the Blues Brothers and the Killer Bees.Franne Lee, a costume and set designer who while doing Tony Award-winning work on Broadway in the 1970s also made killer-bee suits and cone-shaped headwear for early “Saturday Night Live” sketches, helping to create some of that era’s most memorable comic moments, died on Sunday in Atlantis, Fla. She was 81.Her daughter, Stacy Sandler, announced the death, after a short illness that she did not specify.Ms. Lee did some of her most high-profile work in the 1970s while in a relationship with the set designer Eugene Lee. She collaborated with him on productions including an acclaimed “Candide,” directed by Harold Prince at the Chelsea Theater Center in Brooklyn in 1973. It moved to the Broadway Theater in Midtown Manhattan the next year and ran there for 740 performances.“The production has been designed by those experts, Eugene and Franne Lee,” Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times, reviewing the Broadway incarnation, “and they have knocked the innards out of this respectable Broadway house and made it into an obstacle course of seats, musicians’ areas, catwalks, drawbridges and playing platforms, with one conventional stage thrown in at the end of the space for good measure and convenience.”The Lees shared the 1974 Tony Award for scenic design, and Ms. Lee won another for costuming, her specialty. As the story goes, one person who saw that “Candide” was a young producer named Lorne Michaels, who was creating an unconventional late-night show for NBC. He was impressed and brought the Lees in as designers on the show that, when it made its debut in October 1975, was called “NBC’s Saturday Night” but soon became “Saturday Night Live.”The original “S.N.L.” cast quickly made its mark with outlandish sketches, and Ms. Lee was integral to the look of those now famous bits — dressing John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd in black when they became the Blues Brothers, turning cut-up long johns into the yellow-striped Killer Bee costumes, and more.Dan Aykroyd, left, and John Belushi as the Blues Brothers on “Saturday Night Live.” Ms. Lee designed their costumes.Edie Baskin/OnyxIt was costume designing on the cheap. Ms. Lee’s father, a tool-and-die maker, came up with the bouncy springs that were the Killer Bees’ antennae, which she finished off by sticking Ping-Pong balls on the ends. John Storyk, who first met Ms. Lee in 1968 when both worked at the short-lived Manhattan club Cerebrum, recalled in a phone interview dropping by the Lees’ apartment and seeing on her work table the beginnings of the cones that became the defining feature of the Coneheads, the extraterrestrials who were a recurring presence on the show in the late 1970s and later got their own feature film.In an interview for the book “Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers and Guests” (2002), by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller, James Signorelli, a longtime “S.N.L.” producer, said that Ms. Lee influenced fashion beyond the studio walls.“The way Franne Lee, our costume designer, dressed Lorne for the show suddenly became the way everybody in New York was dressing,” he said. “Lorne used to come out onstage wearing a shirt, jacket and bluejeans. Nobody had ever seen it. But before you knew it, everybody was sitting around in Levis and a jacket.”Laraine Newman, an original “S.N.L.” cast member, recalled one time when Ms. Lee herself became part of the action — not on the show, but during a photo shoot Ms. Newman was doing with Francesco Scavullo, the noted fashion and celebrity photographer. Ms. Newman was working a vampire look, complete with fangs.“Franne found me this incredible Edwardian black lace dress,” Ms. Newman said by email, “and we did wonderful shots with that, and then Scavullo had this idea that Franne should be my victim, and so there are shots of me like biting Franne’s neck. It was so hard not to laugh because Franne was making these faces trying to look horrified or drained of blood. It’s a wonderful memory, and it still makes me laugh when I think about it. She was so very talented.”Len Cariou, left, and Angela Lansbury in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lee won a Tony Award for her costumes.Martha Swope/New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman CenterThat talent earned Ms. Lee another Tony Award in 1979 for her costume designs for the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” the Stephen Sondheim musical about a murderous barber who has his victims made into meat pies. The show was directed by Mr. Prince, who Ms. Lee said initially told her he was reluctant to take on the project despite her urging.“He told me: ‘You’re crazy, absolutely crazy! You can’t do a musical about people eating people,’” she recalled in a 2002 interview with The Tennessean newspaper. “‘I said, ‘Why not?’”Frances Elaine Newman was born on Dec. 30, 1941, in the Bronx to Martin and Anne (Marks) Newman. Her father had a small machine shop on Long Island, and her mother was an offset printing supervisor.Ms. Lee was studying painting at the University of Wisconsin, her daughter said, when she discovered her love of theater and costume design. She was married to Ralph Sandler at the time and relocated to Pennsylvania when his job took him there, doing costume and design work for local theaters. The couple divorced in 1967, and Ms. Lee relocated to New York.“Franne and I both answered the same ad,” Mr. Storyk said, recalling how they found themselves working at Cerebrum. Mr. Storyk designed the club; Ms. Lee was what was called a guide, leading patrons through the place, which promoted consciousness-raising and featured various interactive environments. It closed in less than a year.Ms. Lee, though, continued to pursue her theatrical interests, creating costumes for groups including Theater of the Living Arts in Philadelphia. She also met Mr. Lee. Among their earliest collaborations as scenic designers — with Ms. Lee still credited as Franne Newman — was a version of “Alice in Wonderland” staged by the director André Gregory in 1970 that drew rave reviews.Ms. Lee in 2015.Amber Arnold/Wisconsin State JournalThe two became a couple and Franne adopted Mr. Lee’s name, though the nature of their relationship remained hazy; Patrick Lynch, a longtime aide to Mr. Lee, said the two were never formally married. (Mr. Lee died in February.) In any case, their personal and professional partnership continued until 1980, the year Ms. Lee left “Saturday Night Live.”She continued to design costumes for shows in New York in the 1980s and ’90s, including a few short-lived Broadway productions and, in the mid-’90s at the Public Theater, Christopher Walken’s examination of the life and legend of Elvis Presley, “Him.”She also tried the West Coast for a time, working on a few television shows and made-for-TV movies. In 2001 she settled in Nashville, where she was involved in founding Plowhaus, a gallery and artists’ cooperative. She later lived in Wisconsin, and since 2017 she had lived in Lake Worth Beach, Fla., about 65 miles north of Miami, designing costumes for theaters in that area.In addition to her daughter, from her marriage to Mr. Sandler, Ms. Lee is survived by a son from that marriage, Geoffrey Sandler; a son with Mr. Lee, Willie Lee; a brother, Bill Newman; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.The frugal D.I.Y. ethos of her “S.N.L.” years stayed with Ms. Lee throughout her costume-designing career. In 2018 she worked on costumes for a production of Conor McPherson’s thriller “The Birds” (based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie) at the Garden Theater in Winter Garden, Fla. It required a wedding dress, which she bought at a thrift shop for $45.“I’m a senior citizen,” she told The Orlando Sentinel, “so if I go on Wednesday, things are half price.” More

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      Can ’Candide,’ ‘Rent’ and ‘Spamalot’ Ever Be Truly Revived?

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      “Candide” in an opera house. “Spamalot” and “Rent” cheek by jowl with Shakespeare. But treating them as classics may not be doing them justice.There comes a moment in the afterlife of even the most successful musical when it threatens to become a museum piece. One day, it’s the hot new thing, perhaps even defining its era; next, it’s “The Merry Widow.”On a theater trip through New York State and Ontario last month, I saw three musical revivals in various stages of that transformation: one — “Candide” — fully evolved into an opera house staple that’s rarely performed anywhere else; the other two — “Rent” and “Spamalot” — on uncertain trajectories toward classic status or the dustbin.The “Candide,” at the Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., opened with what seemed to be an acknowledgment of the situation. From a stageful of shadows at the Alice Busch Opera Theater, Glimmerglass’s home on sparkling Otsego Lake, dim forms awakened as if from a long slumber, emerging from tarps and storage trunks. Eventually a sort of ghostly maitre d’ cued the orchestra, which sprang to life with the undying joy of Leonard Bernstein’s overture.It was an indication that the somewhat zombified story of “Candide” would always need resuscitating by the music. Rejiggered every which way since it was first produced on Broadway in 1956, the book has so many problems and variations that the options for reviving it resemble a game of 3-D chess. And the list of musical numbers Bernstein wrote to accommodate the changes — then discarded, rewrote, re-discarded, recombined and otherwise cycled into and out of the score — comes to nearly 100 titles.Glimmerglass’s version, originally produced there in 2015, is itself a revival, no more dramaturgically coherent in Francesca Zambello’s staging than any other. Though adapted from a Voltaire novella generally considered a masterpiece, its story — an innocent boy’s education in optimism is undone by the ever more absurd horrors of the actual world — becomes a case of diminishing returns when staged. Nora Ephron, noting that you get tired of the characters’ misadventures long before they do, called it a musical that always seems to be great “on the night you’re not seeing it.”True, yet it is at the same time glorious. Young singers with clarion voices — and a 42-piece opera orchestra, conducted with incisive good humor by Joseph Colaneri — bear you swiftly through the longueurs. In the process, a flop that tried too hard to be au courant, satirizing America’s postwar euphoria, is transformed into a timeless piece that, having found its niche, lives on and on. When Candide and his lover, separated by various disasters, sing the lovely and witty “You Were Dead, You Know,” they might be singing about the show itself.Brian Vu, center, as the title character in “Candide,” whose optimism is unraveled over the course of the musical by the horrors of the real world.Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass FestivalThere’s a similar moment in “Spamalot,” the deliberately ludicrous musical by Eric Idle and the composer John Du Prez. If you’re familiar with “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the 1975 movie on which it’s closely based, you’ll probably be laughing even before a chorus of medieval plague victims, being carted off in tumbrels, sing pathetically that they’re “not dead yet.” One of them insists he’s in fact feeling much better.I don’t know whether “Spamalot,” playing this year at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, can expect a similar recovery. A Broadway hit in 2005, it offered silly distraction and precision direction (by no less than Mike Nichols) in the ongoing dark after the Sept. 11 attacks. Not that it was designed to speak to its time, let alone all time; it was content just to fill time. Its ambitions seemed limited to rhyming “Lancelot” with “dance a lot” and trotting out a Python dream team including the French taunter, the knights who say “Ni” and a chorus line of self-flagellating monks bonking themselves on the upbeat.Like the movie, it was a blast, even if its satire, coming from all directions, seemed to have no target. (Much of what it pokes fun at are the conventions of musicals themselves.) Seeing it at Stratford, as part of a 12-show repertory that includes four Shakespeare productions as well as new plays and modern classics, is a disorienting experience. As comedies go, it’s no “Much Ado About Nothing.” The festival’s dignity and its ethos of highbrow good work do something weird to material so deliberately lowbrow and anti-establishment.In 2018 at Stratford, “The Rocky Horror Show” suffered from a similar problem — but recent Stratford productions of “Chicago,” “The Music Man” and “Guys and Dolls” (all directed and choreographed by Donna Feore) did not. The festival does sincerity, even the gimlet-eyed kind, very well. But as directed by Lezlie Wade and choreographed by Jesse Robb, “Spamalot” feels hasty and mechanical, relying on the prefab jokes to do most of the work. They don’t.Yet it’s not clear to me that even a fresher and more idiomatic take would solve much. (We’ll have a chance to find out with the arrival of a completely different “Spamalot” revival on Broadway this fall.) For many of us, the punchlines are so ingrained that they have become golden oldies, suitable for a kind of karaoke pleasure but unlikely to produce helpless guffaws. Maybe comedy needs to skip a few generations until minds that know nothing of migratory coconuts can test its enduring worth.But what about tragedy? For the sake of argument, let’s call “Rent” a tragedy even though it does everything in its considerable power to turn the nightmare of AIDS in the late 1980s, recalling parallel plagues in its 19th-century sources, into musical theater uplift. And time has further distorted it. In the manner of “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in their time, the show’s big anthem, “Seasons of Love,” has now delaminated from its story entirely. Instead of a plea to treasure brief lives, it has become an all-purpose good-times chorale; my sons (today in their late 20s) sang it at their elementary school graduations.Nestor Lozano Jr., center, as the drag queen Angel in the 2023 Stratford Festival production of “Rent.”David HouAn author should be so lucky as to have that problem, but it nevertheless is a problem. So is the meta-tragedy surrounding “Rent,” whose author, Jonathan Larson, died at 35 in the hours just before the show’s scheduled premiere. The work has essentially been frozen as he left it that day in 1996. Thom Allison, who directed Stratford’s production, told me that permission for even the tiniest change in the script, to correct an acknowledged inconsistency, was denied by the estate’s representatives.That leaves new generations little wiggle room in which to experiment with refreshing “Rent” and finessing its headaches. As always, it struck me in the Stratford production that the work of the downtown artists the show means to valorize is actually terrible; that the central male character is utterly passive; that its credibility as history is all but shattered by the last-minute resurrection of a character we’ve just watched succumb to AIDS. Having seen “Spamalot” the night before, I was surprised she didn’t sing “I’m Not Dead Yet” as she awoke.Yet Allison’s staging at Stratford’s flagship Festival Theater, also home this season to “Much Ado About Nothing” and “King Lear,” made a pretty good case that, in its scale at least, “Rent” can hold its own in such company. Certainly the story of the drag queen Angel and her lover Tom Collins (traced in the songs “Today 4 U,” “I’ll Cover You” and “Santa Fe”) has a full arc and tragic grandeur, enhanced here by frankness. The sight of Angel, beneath her drag, covered in Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions from neck to ankle (thanks to a cleverly made body suit) sent me reeling back to 1989.The question is whether “Rent” can be meaningful even for those unable to be reeled back that way. The Stratford production makes the case that it can, but however much the appearance of a new section of the AIDS quilt during the finale moved me, I wondered how many people under 40 even knew what it was. Some shows are so of their moment that they cannot be wholly of ours.CandideThrough Aug. 20 at the Glimmerglass Festival, Cooperstown, N.Y.; glimmerglass.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.SpamalotThrough Oct. 28 at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.RentThrough Oct. 28 at the Stratford Festival, Stratford, Ontario; stratfordfestival.ca. Running time: 2 hours 41 minutes. More

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      Robert Kalfin, Founder of an Adventurous Theater, Dies at 89

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      For two decades, his Chelsea Theater Center was on the cutting edge with productions that could be challenging, baffling or, sometimes, Broadway bound.Robert Kalfin, the driving force behind the Chelsea Theater Center, which for two decades beginning in 1965 presented adventurous plays that were sometimes too innovative for the theatergoing public and sometimes successful enough that they transferred to Broadway, died on Sept. 20 at a hospice center in Quiogue, a hamlet in Southampton, N.Y. He was 89.Philip Himberg, a longtime friend, said the cause was acute myeloid leukemia.Mr. Kalfin directed countless plays in a career that began in his mid-20s and continued into his 80s. In 1965, he started the nonprofit Chelsea Theater Center and became its founding artistic director, with David Long as managing director and George Bari as production manager.They set up shop in St. Peter’s Church in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, though a strip dance in one of its early offerings got the group tossed out of that church and forced it to move to another. Those were two of several locations it would use over the years, only some of which were in Chelsea.Mr. Kalfin thought the commercial theaters of the day were limited and unimaginative, and he strove to broaden the theatrical landscape.“The mission statement, which I came up with, which was very useful, was ‘We will do whatever nobody else is doing and what we think people ought to see,’” he said in an interview in 2014 for the Primary Stages Off-Broadway Oral History Project. “That gave me great leeway.”The Chelsea achieved particular prominence once it moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1968. Its productions there were attention-getting, to say the least. A 1969 staging of “Slave Ship,” written by Amiri Baraka (who was then known as LeRoi Jones) and directed by Gilbert Moses, took on racism, leaving Clive Barnes of The New York Times rattled.“The play is set in the hold of a ship and the conscience of a nation,” Mr. Barnes wrote in his review.“The play ends with the symbolic destruction of white America,” he added. “Whitey is got — Black Panther banners are unfurled. This scared and horrified me. I am whitey.”In 1971, The Times wrote an article about Mr. Kalfin’s troupe that carried the headline “America’s Most Exciting New Theater?” Its productions for the rest of that decade cemented its stature as one of the scene’s leading innovators.In 1973, the Chelsea revived the Leonard Bernstein operetta “Candide,” which had failed on Broadway in the 1950s, and gave it a new book, by Hugh Wheeler. Harold Prince directed, and the result was a smash in Brooklyn that became the group’s first transfer to Broadway, where it ran for almost two years.Another great success was “Strider,” Mark Rozovsky’s play with music based on a Tolstoy story about a piebald horse that is tormented because of its appearance. Mr. Kalfin first saw it in Leningrad, and in 1979 he staged an English-language version at the Westside Theater on West 43rd Street. It drew a strong review from Mel Gussow in The Times.“We are transported by the ingenuousness and the originality of the show,” he wrote. “Looking closely, we even notice a grittiness that might have been appreciated by Brecht and Weill. The play works on two levels, as a kind of Tolstoyan ‘Black Beauty’ — downbeat but finally inspirational — and as a valid commentary on the injustices of civilization.”That show, directed by Mr. Kalfin and Lynne Gannaway, transferred to Broadway and ran there for six months.By then Mr. Kalfin was seeing a change in theater audiences, one that his company had helped bring about.“There’s a whole new generation of theatergoers, and they have become elitist in a very positive way,” he told The Times that November as “Strider” was beginning its Broadway run. “I think they’re bored to death with television, and they’re more demanding of theater now because they’re so hungry for nourishment.”A scene from the Chelsea Theater Center’s production of Amiri Baraka’s “Slave Ship” in 1969. The play’s ending, the Times critic Clive Barnes wrote, “scared and horrified me.”Deidi von Schaewen, via BAM Hamm ArchivesRobert Zangwill Kalfin was born on April 22, 1933, in the Bronx. His father, Alfred, was a real estate developer, and his mother, Hilda Shulman Kalfin, was a teacher.His childhood memories were of being taken not to the theater but to the Metropolitan Opera, where he and his parents generally ended up in the cheap seats, high up and off to the side.“My father would hold onto the back of my pants while I leaned over trying to see center stage,” he said in the oral history.He studied music at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and Performing Arts). As a theater major at Alfred University in central New York, he became part of an ambitious department that was staging Bertolt Brecht and other European writers and experimenting with unusual settings — he was in a production of “Androcles and the Lion” that was staged in a gymnasium transformed to look like a Roman arena.He earned his master’s degree in 1957 at the Yale School of Drama and settled into odd jobs in New York, working for a time in the shipping department at WOR-TV and as a production assistant on a children’s television show in Newark, N.J., that starred a chimpanzee.He directed his first Off Broadway production, “The Golem,” in 1959, at St. Mark’s Playhouse. His other early efforts included “The Good Soldier Schweik” in 1963, which didn’t go well — a producer interfered so intrusively that Mr. Kalfin withdrew before opening night and sought unsuccessfully to stop the production from opening. When it did, William Glover of The Associated Press called it “one of the season’s worst plays.”Mr. Kalfin, right, with Michael David, left, the executive director of the Chelsea Theater Center, and Burl Hash, the production director, in 1973.Manuel Guevaza Jr.At the Chelsea, Mr. Kalfin sometimes left audiences and critics scratching their heads. That was the case with a 1970 musical called “Tarot,” which he staged in Brooklyn. As the credits read, it was conceived by The Rubber Duck and directed jointly by “Mr. Duck” (as The Times called him, tongue in cheek) and Mr. Kalfin.Mr. Barnes hated it. “Pretentiousness is rioting at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,” his review began. Yet the Chelsea was respected enough by then that even in that pan, Mr. Barnes felt compelled to note that the group was facing one of its frequent financial crises at the time, and that “it simply must not be allowed to die.”The group did peter out in the mid-1980s, swamped with debt. Before it did, its other notable successes included “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” based on an Isaac Bashevis Singer story of a Jewish girl who passes as a boy; Mr. Kalfin had it adapted for the stage by Leah Napolin and directed it. It opened in Brooklyn in December 1974.It was a tough road to opening night. Mr. Kalfin clashed with Tovah Feldshuh, who played the title character, and withstood complaints from Orthodox Jewish leaders; he also had to strike a deal with Barbra Streisand, who owned the rights to the Singer story, which she would turn into a film in 1983. But the play moved to Broadway, where it ran for 223 performances.Mr. Bari, Mr. Kalfin’s life partner, died in 2013. Mr. Kalfin, who had lived in East Hampton, N.Y., leaves no immediate survivors.After the Chelsea gave up the ghost, Mr. Kalfin continued to direct in New York and in regional houses; he was still working until recently. One of his post-Chelsea projects in New York was directing a Yiddish version of “Yentl” produced by the Folksbiene Yiddish Theater in 2002. Eleanor Reissa played the title role.“Even though he’d directed maybe a hundred shows, every time was like the first,” Ms. Reissa, who had worked with Mr. Kalfin on other shows as well, said by email. “Wide eyed and wide hearted always, infectious joyfulness.” More