News

Fans of satirical musical theatre and those who have a burning desire to see world leaders in their bathing trunks (and there must be a crossover audience) can rest easy. Since last week, Silvio Berlusconi, George W. Bush and their friends, or at least singers wearing those familiar masks, have been dancing semi-naked on the stage of the London Coliseum.

A year ago, it seemed that Italian opera fans were going to be denied this singular pleasure. The new production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide, revamped by Canadian director Robert Carsen, had been announced as part of La Scala's lineup, and then mysteriously cancelled.

Rumours began flying: Was La Scala's director, Stéphane Lissner, bowing to political pressure and criticism in the Italian media over the mockery of Berlusconi and his G8 buddies? (Berlusconi, at that point, had yet to return to power in Italy, but was still a hugely influential media baron.) All the opera house would say was that Candide was “not in line” with its artistic program. The operetta had already had a successful run at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, where a Speedo-clad Jacques Chirac raised no eyebrows.

A few days before Candide was to open, the world's most famous opera house did an about-face. The show would go on in a slightly shortened version, but Bush, Blair, Putin, Berlusconi and Chirac would remain untouched. The flame of satire burned on, fuelled by controversy.

A year later, as Candide is set for a sold-out run at the London Coliseum, Carsen seems unfazed, perhaps even secretly pleased, at the hullabaloo. After all, doesn't it prove that Voltaire, who wrote the novella upon which Bernstein based his musical, still wields a sharp sword? That corruption, greed and the false idols of ideology are as fresh as today's headlines?

Carsen says he would never have considered deleting the contentious scene, even if La Scala had asked: “It would have looked like they were censoring me and worse, I was accepting it. But,” he says with a gleam, “I did think it was rather fabulous that Voltaire could still be as controversial a couple of hundred years later.”

The entire history of Candide, from its origins as a novella published anonymously in 1759 to its unsuccessful Broadway run in 1956, is a story of tumult, risk and bickering. Voltaire pretended he had nothing to do with the inflammatory attack on religion, optimism and dogmas of all kinds, but as Carsen says, “everybody knew he wrote it.” The novella, which introduced Candide and the blithe Dr. Pangloss into the modern vocabulary, was a huge hit, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in France and in translation.

Voltaire was dismayed by the cruelties of nature and religious persecution (the Lisbon earthquake is followed, in his fictional treatment, by an auto-da-fé). Two hundred years later, two of the great voices of American theatre were dismayed by a witch hunt of a political nature. In 1953, Lillian Hellman wrote to Leonard Bernstein, suggesting that as they'd both been singed by the McCarthy hearings in the United States, they should write a musical adaptation of Candide.

Bernstein accepted, a decision he might have later regretted, for after a failed Broadway run, he continued to tinker with Candide until his death in 1990. “Bernstein had great affection for it,” Carsen says, “the way you do for a problem child.”

Bernstein and Hellman argued, and she withdrew her book after a nasty fight. Many other cooks had their spoons in the lyrical soup: Dorothy Parker, Stephen Sondheim, John Latouche, Hugh Wheeler. What remained through every revision was the bitter, if lightly concealed, indictment of American paranoia. Carsen begins quoting the lyrics from one number: “We don't eat meat and dairy/ we don't eat humble pie/ so sing a miserere/ and hang the bastards high.” The method of retribution might be different, but “that's about the Rosenbergs, isn't it?”

Carsen had never seen a production of Candide, although he was familiar with the score. “The music is so extraordinary,” he says. Bernstein “wrote it as a love letter to Europe, there's the waltz and the barcarole and all these musical forms he's conjured up. There's all that Bernstein schwung, it's very sexy and exciting and exuberant.”

When Paris's Châtelet theatre approached him with the idea of reviving Candide, Carsen had one major goal: To make the material contemporary. He intended to rewrite the text while leaving the songs intact. To his surprise, the Bernstein estate gave its nod of approval. “Both for Voltaire and for Bernstein the piece was a criticism of their own society. It seemed important to bring back some of that back.”

There's only so much you can do with a “dead-weird,” non-linear narrative in which characters keep returning from the dead, but Carsen and his designer, fellow Canadian Michael Levine, have dragged this strange beast into the late 20th century. So, in place of a shipwreck, there's a tanker spilling oil, and in place of five deposed kings moaning about their lot in a European café, there are five heads of state – not all former, alas – dancing on a beach during a package holiday in the sun.

Carsen, 53, was raised in Toronto and for two years studied theatre at the city's York University, before heading to Britain to join the Bristol Old Vic. In 2005, he and his father, the Toronto philanthropist Walter Carsen, were given joint honorary doctorates from York. “I was very touched,” he says, “though I felt obliged to point out that I had dropped out and come to England.”

Now Carsen, who divides his time between London and Paris, is a sought-after director on the continent, and has returned to England with Candide and a highly praised L'incoronazione di Poppea at the Glyndebourne Festival, where he started out as an assistant. Does he see working in Canada in the near future? “I'd like to. We're talking about one or two things.”

In the meantime, he has a dream about bringing Candide back to Broadway, where it began. This might fall under the category of wishful thinking, however. “I don't know if producers think it's too…” Carsen's voice trails off, before he starts up again. “You could view it as anti-American, but I don't think it is. I think it's questioning what the American dream is, and how one might make it work. How open we all are to corruption, and how our dreams turn to nightmares.”

Candide continues at the London Coliseum until July 12.