The legacy of NZ Opera general director Stuart Maunder has been to grow our garden of opera talent, evidenced nowhere better than in this punchy, pacey production of Candide. From their germination in Wellington, James Benjamin Rodgers in the title role and Amelia Berry as his Cunegonde, have blossomed into a charismatic, romantic, heart-stealing leading man and a seductive, vocally outstanding, energetic and sassy leading lady. Both reach way beyond the footlights with almost physical audience contact and assured, soaring singing.

Maunder is a lover of the musical, a self-confessed showtime “tragic”, and he employs every comic and stage device to give wigs and wings to Bernstein’s unstoppably optimistic and ultimately joy-infused send-up of religion, establishment and unquestioning blind faith in the perfection of an obviously imperfect world.

The original satire of eighteenth century optimism was French polemicist Voltaire’s joust at the original writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It was the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, with its huge death toll, that provoked Voltaire’s literary attack on Leibnitz’s assertion that a perfect creator could have created only a perfect world, where everything is by definition the way it should be. Uber-Gilbertian in its satire, this is fertile, home ground for director Stuart Maunder.

For Candide, Bernstein seems to take sparks of almost everything he has created or curated, stirring them with minimal blending into a wicked romp that, since its revelation in 1956, has had more interpretations than the Treaty of Waitangi. This led the composer in 1989 to create a “final revised version” that includes the best of all possible lyrics, with colours of collaborator Stephen Sondheim, and for me has some echoes of Bernstein’s Mass of 1971.

This production is much more than a semi-staged operetta; it has a true festival feeling about it. NZ Opera has built a pier out from the Town Hall stage into the auditorium, adding to the very physical and energetic performance a frisson of the ringside, as singers slug it out in a choreographed, all-singing, all-dancing dervish of activity.  Re-purposing the chandeliers, chaise and Spanish costumes from La Traviata, and hiding the organ behind a huge red-draped map of Europe and Africa, designer Roger Kirk has worked with lighting designer Trudy Dalgliesh to define with fans of light, costumes and props, the flux of worlds that the picaresque progress requires.

A run through the perpetrators and plot: the bastard nephew of an old German baron, the naive Candide is educated with the narcissistic young baron Maximilian by philosopher Dr Pangloss, aka Voltaire (played in true music hall style by Australian doyen Reg Livermore). Paquette is the baron’s well-bundled chambermaid who is also a dab hand at helping His Excellency in the stables, armed with lubricant. The young baron’s sister, Cunegunde, who appears to need no such aids, is abetted by The Old Lady who has only one buttock (a story to be told at another time).

After military service Candide runs away to the Netherlands and is befriended by a religious fanatic. Pangloss turns up. A murder or two later, and an escape from the Inquisition, sees our hero and his lady in South America (via Cardiff). The Old Lady, who is the daughter of a pope, befriends Cunegonde, while a newly acquired aid and fan, Cacambo, helps Candide. The young baron mysteriously turns up and is killed.

The utopia of Eldorado is the next setting, on the way to France and then Venice. The action concludes in a casino, and there’s another couple of killings squeezed into the rare moments where Cunegonde is not being laid, adored and adorned.

The show sets off at a cracking pace with a fluid, sparkling Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of NZ Opera’s long-serving and internationally respected director of music, Wyn Davies. It is soon apparent that the balance between orchestra, substantial chorus and amplified principals is judicious, and that chorus members under choreographer Yvette Lee and director Maunder will be running, dancing and acting up a storm.

Bouquets to Christchurch members Chris McRae and Angus Simmons especially, who seem to be first choice for the more dextrous roles. Once again the hand-picked Freemasons’ NZ Opera chorus is the mulch for this garden, producing a warm and well-coordinated wall of song. 

Another hallmark of Stuart Maunder’s tenure has been his amazing casting skill and here it is to the fore. Amelia Berry raised critics’ and audience eyebrows in Don Giovanni as Zerlina, and the cautious path she has taken to the top Es of Candide now give us a forceful and confident soprano set for further achievements. Presented as a porcelain, coquettish opportunist, she is as infectious as laughter and absolutely illuminating on stage, stunning the audience with her easy and playful runs and ascents, dropping onto the highest notes with gentle accuracy of a vocal dancer en pointe.

James Rodgers has escaped from his moustache to lose a decade in appearance and convincingly assume the youthful agility and eagerness of the aptly named Candide. His love of the art song and the theatricality of that repertoire (Kurt Weill especially) shows in his absolute tenure of the stage and his communication with the audience, almost in the round (horse-shoe?) which is demanding.  The occasional abrasion in his otherwise super-smooth delivery of the romantic style may just be a slight overdose of dramatic texturing, but not for a moment does it detract.  Well controlled, and holding his notes with air to spare, open-throated, unaffected and wonderfully “un-operatic”, he gives us a beautifully judged, warm, accurate and beguiling young musical hero, building on his Anthony in Sweeney Todd.

Robert Tucker, playing various secondary roles, has put in the hard yards and continues to flourish as an all-round performer, as does Natasha Wilson playing Paquette.

To these blooming local rising stars add Byron Cole, another Maunder stroke of genius when he was cast to debut for the company as Koko in The Mikado. He does, as the cliché says, explode upon the stage, and his southern Baptist is as over-the-top as you could ask for. He shows a dexterity of voice that suggests a wide range of future comic roles in the world of opera. 

Mr Comic himself is Reg Livermore. Channelling the Thenadier of Les Miserables, he is pure showmanship. His multiplicity of guises kept us amused, although his final character’s accent affectation is just a little incomprehensible. He also has good lungs!  Jacqueline Dark has perhaps also observed Mme Thenadier, but she gives us great entertainment and vocal dexterity as The Old Lady, and surely the wig is familiar from the NZO’s La Cenerentola, which adds another delicious layer to her duet with Amelia Berry who played one of those two evil sisters.

There are too many good things to cover in one review. They include the mouton en mascara, wonderful comic business from Kanen Breen as the Governor and from James Harrison as Maximilian, a gloriously different ‘Glitter and be Gay’, and a nimble APO. A collection of artistic resources that borders on coincidence.  We think not.  Mr Bernstein would likely be happy with this eclectic, edifying, 100^th birthday production.

Candide is bawdy, bright and sparkling – it is impossible not to fall in love with its hero and his vocally and dramatically stellar consort. Take a bow Mr Maunder, as you leave the best of all possible worlds.  For Australia.  

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