Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
September 29, 2018

It was American playwright Lillian Hellman who suggested the idea of Candide to Leonard Bernstein in 1953. Concerned at the Inquisition-like hearings by the House of Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Joseph McCarthy, she proposed they adapt Voltaire’s 1759 novella, which satirised the 18th century philosophy of Optimism, that professed all was as it should be under a benevolent God who had created “the best of all possible worlds”. At the time Voltaire wrote it, the Spanish Inquisition was burning heretics, then came the Great Lisbon earthquake which killed thousands.

Phillip Scott, Alexander Lewis and cast members of Candide. Photograph © Grant Leslie Photography

When Phillip Scott, who played the narrator in the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ delightful concert version of Candide, introduced the show and its history, there was applause from the audience at a reference to current “political self-interest”. The somewhat convoluted, peripatetic plot of Candide may lack a strong dramatic structure but the show still has much to say to audiences today, and there is plenty of musical brilliance in the score.

Candide premiered in 1956 with a book by Hellman but flopped. Since 1974,...