Glitter and Be Gone At Intermission

Candide opened tonight at NY City Opera, and it's a seriously mixed bag. The acoustical black hole which is 2/3 of Lincoln Center makes one fantasize about the west side tenements reclaiming the complex so the Sharks and the Jets could keep dance-fighting with each other.

Watching an opera in the State Theater is like listening to a symphony in Avery Fisher. You can see everything plainly enough, but it all sounds like it's happening in the next room over.

The production was brilliantly designed, but the staging left a great deal to be desired. Arthur Masella had poor Daniel Reichard walk through the entire second row of the house while singing "It Must Be So" with a bindle on his back. The fourth wall stuff got old as soon as it started, with the chorus entering from the side doors.

It only ever worked when Richard Kind was hamming it up, particularly as the Sage in the penultimate scene, but even then it left him with a terribly awkward re-entrance as Voltaire in the closer. He shambled onto the far wing of the stage, stood there for the entire number, and then scurried to the center for the last note. Distracting and pointless is the name of that game.

And Candide remains as flawed as ever, though it, out of all his work, does seem to sum up the composer best. All of Bernstein is there: the restless intelligence, the virtuosity, the tenuous sense of drama, and the shallow grasping at profundity.

The opera is front-loaded with gems, and then tapers off into one big filler fest, which only intermittently hints at the brilliance of its source material. All the biting wit, which would have made Shostakovich drool, evaporates by the middle of the first act. You could pin that all on the mess that was the libretto, but the music's the thing in any opera. Bernstein spins gold out of the gate, but by intermission, he's just spinning his wheels.