DVDs: The Best of All Possible Worlds
It may have been a short-lived flop in its original, 1956 Broadway production, but Leonard Bernstein's Candide has managed to amass seven cast recordings and about as many different performing versions. The recordings comprise three Broadway sets the middle one, from 1974, is the only recorded Candide not on CD; two London versions a concert and a National Theatre set; and two opera-house productions New York City Opera, Scottish Opera.
There have been three previous Candide videos: a "Live from Lincoln Center" telecast of the early-'80s City Opera/Hal Prince/Hugh Wheeler version; the late-'80s Scottish Opera version telecast only in the U.K.; and the early-'90s, Bernstein-conducted London concert, preserving the composer's last word on which songs should be included and which omitted or altered.
The new DVD from Image Entertainment offers a live concert performance from Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, taped on May 8, 2004 and featuring the orchestra most associated with Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Bernstein protegee Marin Alsop. Directed by Lonny Price, the two-hour program not only ranks as the fourth Candide video, but might be considered the eighth cast recording. Of the previous videos, only the London concert was commercially released, on VHS; the new video is the first Candide DVD.
Price has made a distinct career of staging concert versions of Broadway musicals, most of them Sweeney Todd, Pal Joey, Can-Can, Annie Get Your Gun, Passion, A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park with George, Anyone Can Whistle featuring Patti LuPone. Price's Candide concert mixes Broadway performers LuPone, Kristin Chenoweth, Jeff Blumenkrantz, Janine LaManna, Michael McCormick, John Herrera, Michael McElroy, Ray Wills, Patty Goble with opera singers American tenor Paul Groves in the title role; distinguished British baritone Sir Thomas Allen as Pangloss/Voltaire/Narrator; and tenor Stamford Olsen.
In a program note, Price described his Candide concert as "a hybrid: part Hal Prince's original cut-down version, part the New York City Opera version, part the Scottish Opera House version, and part a standard concert version." It featured Price's adaptation of the Wheeler script, and a mixed tunestack not identical to that of any previous version. The choreographer was Spamalot's Casey Nicholaw.
In that same program note, Price wrote, "As Candide is satire, the tone we're after tonight is light, comic---hopefully, a good time." Wheeler's book is arch and campy to begin with, and Price's production added a good many additional, visual jokes, including an on-stage chrous holding up signs to spell out various locations and events "Ladies and gentleman, Ms. Patti LuPone", Candide packing a soundtrack LP of West Side Story as he departs Westphalia, and the auto-da-fe inquisitor as Donald Trump.
The result of all this was a fairly heavy-handed Candide, lacking charm and elegance. But if one concentrates on the music, it's a generally respectable, if less than revelatory, performance. Groves and Allen are excellent. Although she's required to do some strained, strenuous comic business during "Glitter and Be Gay" and some cutesy staging elsewhere, Chenoweth is an impressive Cunegonde. The opera-mezzo music of the Old Lady doesn't always lie comfortably for LuPone, but she mostly gets by.
As the first and only Candide DVD, and because of the presence of Chenoweth and LuPone, musical-theatre fans will likely want this release.
BILLY ROSE'S JUMBO Warner Home Video
In 1935, showman Billy Rose produced a Broadway show that was part circus, part musical comedy, and part spectacle. It was called Jumbo after its elephant star the role was played by a lady elephant named Big Rosie, and Rose hired Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart to write the songs.
Rose tore up the vast Hippodrome Theatre on Sixth Avenue and West Forty-Third Street, refashioning it as a circus tent with stadium-style seating looking down on a single, enormous, revolving central ring. At a record cost of $340,000, Jumbo's company of actors, clowns, trapeze performers, jugglers, horseback riders, contortionists, and 1,000 animals was allowed a rehearsal period of six months.
With Jimmy Durante the star and featuring the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, Jumbo finally opened on November 16, 1935. The book, by the quality team of Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur The Front Page, Twentieth Century, was directed by George Abbott, staging his first musical. Rodgers and Hart supplied no less than three hit songs in "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," "Little Girl Blue," and "My Romance." "There's a Small Hotel" was cut from the show but recycled in the next Rodgers and Hart show, On Your Toes.
Jumbo's plot was the old Romeo and Juliet story, this time with a circus setting. The son and daughter of rival circus owners fall in love, but, by evening's end, the family feud is over and the lovers are united. If there were reservations about the slenderness of the book, the reviews that greeted the opening were favorable, with virtually all of the critics awestruck by the sheer enormity of the venture. Unfortunately, the show's scale was ultimately its undoing; Jumbo was simply too expensive to run, and it closed after a decent but disappointing 233 performances.
Twenty-seven years later, Jumbo became a film whose official title was somehow allowed to be Billy Rose's Jumbo, at the insistence of the original producer who had nothing to do with the picture. Directed by Charles Walters, the MGM film was a vehicle for popular star Doris Day. Held over from Broadway was Durante, although in the show he had played a circus press agent, and in the film he was Pop Wonder, the owner of the Wonder Circus.
Sidney Sheldon's screenplay supplied a new but not dissimilar story, in which Day, as Durante's daughter and an occasional bareback rider in the circus, falls for a high-wire aerialist Stephen Boyd, vocals dubbed by James Joyce who is, unbeknownst to the Wonders, the son of a rival circus owner attempting to take over the Wonder Circus and, in particular, its star attraction, Jumbo.
Retained from the stage score were the three hit songs along with "Over and Over Again" and "The Circus Is on Parade." Interpolated from other Rodgers and Hart shows were "Why Can't I?" from Spring Is Here and "This Can't Be Love" The Boys from Syracuse, while associate producer Roger Edens wrote a new musical finale, "Sawdust, Spangles, and Dreams." Jumbo was the last film for veteran choreographer Busby Berkeley.
In The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther wrote, "The only thing vastly wrong with Jumbo is that it is hitting the screen about twenty-five years late...solemn, sluggish, and slow." But Variety felt that the picture was "among the all-time great screen musicals." In fact, the film, which set the action in 1910, is something of a dud.
It does have in its favor the warm presence of comedienne Martha Raye, playing a member of the troupe who's engaged to Pop. Raye and Day in a relaxed duet of "Why Can't I?" is one of the pleasanter moments in the picture. And the film naturally features circus spectacle that even the stage version couldn't rival Sydney the elephant played Jumbo in the film. But while Day applies all of her considerable vocal and dramatic talents to the project, even she can't do much to enliven a flat narrative that's not helped by Boyd's icy performance.
Billy Rose's Jumbo recently received its DVD premiere, and the disc includes one valuable bonus, a 1933 Vitaphone two-reeler called Yours Sincerely. This is a twenty-minute condensation of Rodgers and Hart's 1929 Broadway musical Spring Is Here. It includes three songs from the show title song, "Yours Sincerely," "With a Song in My Heart" along with a few numbers by other songwriters.