Brett Weymark has been wanting to do Candide with the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs pretty much since he took over as Music Director. It is his passion piece and with 2018 marking the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth, he thought it would be a great thing to do.

I’ve also loved the show for years. I remember Nimrod staging it when I was a teenager with Philip Quast as Candide, Jon Ewing as Pangloss, and John Bell directing. Tony Sheldon, who was also in it, is a great mentor of mine and he had an old VHS of that production, which I studied, so I’ve loved it for years. I’ve seen various iterations. There are so many different versions of Candide: the New York Philharmonic version and the Scottish Opera version among others. Bernstein kept chopping and changing it through the years with lots of different writers involved.

Musically it is intoxicating, bold, ambitious, soaring, delicious, hilarious but also a synthesis of much of Bernstein’s own thinking about the world: about youth, humanity’s quest for knowledge, social change and love.

The operetta is based on Voltaire’s novella Candide: The Optimist. Voltaire was one of the great...