The Skylight playfully twists the atmosphere of the Broadway Theatre Center into a deliciously surreal and irreverently absurdist adventure as it opens its season with Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Based on Voltaire’s classic work of literature, the show features a charmingly charismatic Sam Simahk as the haplessly optimistic title character--a privileged, young man who is cast out of an idyllic life and into a strange adventure which finds him questioning his overall optimism at every turn. Susie Robinson plays to great nuance and complexity in the role of Candide’s love Cunegonde. The cast includes some amazing performances around the edges of the ensemble including Andrew Varela as the irrepressibly optimistic Doctor Pangloss, Ben George as the altruistic James the Anabaptist and a pleasantly earthbound Samantha Sostarich as the chambermaid Paquette. Director/scenic designer James Ortiz transports the audience through an astonishingly vivid fantasy world as massive, colorful backgrounds are projected onto immense white screens behind the action. Ortiz draws imagery from a number of different familiar places including the works of M.C. Escher and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Ortiz also designed some graphically impressive puppet for the show including a toweringly ominous inquisitor and a voluminous banker. They both tower over Susie Robinson as they terrorize Cunegonde. Ortiz barrels the Bernstein musical through an impressive range of moods in the course of the adventure. There’s a kind of fearlessness in the mixture of horror, drama, dark and light comedy. Some of it occasionally runs the risk of teetering over the edge of bad taste, but every emotional beat seems to land more or less perfectly in a dazzling stage adventure that fuses fantasy with something that feels far more real than so much of what happens on the world outside the stage. Skylight Music Theatre’s production of Candide runs through Oct. 29 at the Broadway Theatre Center on 158 N. Broadway. For more information, visit Skylight online.
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Russ BickerstaffArchives
April 2024
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