LA Opera Revives Candide With Patti LuPone and a Darker Edge

LA Opera opens Francesca Zambello's production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide on Nov. 21 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with the run continuing through Dec. 13. The cast pairs Broadway legend Patti LuPone as the Old Lady with Scott Bakula in the dual role of Voltaire and Dr. Pangloss.

Resident Conductor Lina González-Granados will be on the podium. "It's timeless, but it's also so current!" she said. "How do you hold onto optimism in the midst of chaos?"

What is the show actually about?

Candide began as Voltaire's mid-18th-century satire, mocking philosophers who assured readers they lived in "the best of all possible worlds." To expose that idea's inanity, Voltaire invented two Everyman figures — the naive Candide and his beloved Cunegonde — and pushed them through a string of calamities across their travels.

In the mid-1950s, a team led by composer Leonard Bernstein, playwright Lillian Hellman and lyricist Richard Wilbur adapted the satire into a work of musical theater. It wasn't an immediate hit, but revivals — often heavily revised — have appeared regularly for decades.

Why does this staging feel pointed now?

Director Francesca Zambello has been living her own Candide-like journey. As artistic director of the Washington National Opera, she has sat at the center of the politically driven chaos at the Kennedy Center. Earlier this year, the company pulled out of its longtime base and found new performance spaces.

That backstory sharpens her reading of the piece. "Candide and Cunegonde are on a long journey in an attempt to find home," Zambello said. "I think the notion of finding home means a lot to people right now."

This is Zambello's seventh Candide. Her production, which has the approval of Jamie Bernstein, the composer's daughter, debuted at the Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York in 2015 and played LA Opera in 2018. The physical production and much of the choreography stay fixed between revivals, but the relationships shift. "The relationships between the main characters change when you have new people in the roles," she said. "You stage it around them, so they can bring their best game to it."

On her stars, Zambello was direct: "Scott's a wonderful actor, and I'm glad to have him. Patti is a queen of comic delivery. She's a gift." González-Granados went further: "I can't tell you what it's like being in the same room as Patti LuPone. It's a master class in how to approach music and character."

Why is there no definitive version?

Bernstein wrote the score around the same time as West Side Story, and it ranges from parodies of classic operetta to contemporary sounds, tangos and gavottes included. "I'd say it's a New York, postmodern piece," said González-Granados. "Bernstein was such a cosmopolitan man. He had a wide knowledge of opera, of Broadway, of Latin American music. He could write a tango as well as a gavotte."

Major changes came in 1973, when Harold Prince directed a revival that moved to Broadway the next year; in 1982 at the New York City Opera; and in 1988 and 1989 in the U.K. Zambello's critically acclaimed staging draws on elements of all of those versions.

What does Zambello do with the famous aria?

Her approach shows most clearly in Cunegonde's coloratura showpiece "Glitter and Be Gay" (coloratura meaning fast, florid soprano singing). Rather than treat it as a display piece, she grounds it in the plot's harsh reality. "I don't think you should just toss that one off," she said. "That's a woman assessing her situation. She's surviving by using her body, and she's realizing she doesn't like it. That situation is very much in people's minds right now, between Jeffrey Epstein and [the sexual assault allegations at] Cornell."

"The piece feels darker now than it once did," she added. "But I also think it's cathartic, because the end gives us hope for tomorrow."

Zambello stays loyal to Voltaire throughout: "The piece is a journey, an odyssey. There's a lot of tongue-in-cheek material, but the love story between Cunegonde and Candide is very real." For audiences weighing whether to book, the draw is a staging that treats an absurdist classic as a survival story — absurdity that, as Zambello notes, "we see happening all around us today."