ARTS MONDAY: DHO Candide Goes 1950s Style

Princesses become strip-teasing starlets, peasants turn into movie extras, and prostitutes are reincarnated as older, sexually active stars in the Dunster House Opera Society’s (DHO) take on Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Under the guidance of innovative first-time stage director Kate D. Greenhalgh ’06, the DHO version of Candide, which is based on Voltaire’s work by the same title, will transport the characters from their traditional setting in the medieval past to 1950s Hollywood.

Founded in 1992 by Dunster House residents, DHO is entirely student -run and -operated, and performs one opera each year. Although open to singers of all experiences, DHO attracts strong voices from the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, the Harvard Glee Club, and the Radcliffe Choral Society. Owing to its popularity as a fun and profitable show, Candide will take the stage again, after a five-year absence since its last on-campus performance in 1999.

Greenhalgh’s take on Candide is largely inspired by the legendary composer, Bernstein, who is perhaps best known for his West Side Story score. “Bernstein was very much a Hollywood celebrity, and was very in touch with that scene, and I feel that a lot of the parallels really resonate between what Voltaire was meaning to satirize and what Bernstein saw in his own time,” says the director, relating a scene that was originally about the Spanish Inquisition to a scene that has been updated to reflect McCarthyist themes.

In this new rendition, Candide, played by Patrick W. Hosfield ’05, is an extra who is in love with the movie star Cundegonde (Lara M. Hirner ’05-’06), much to the disapproval of Cundegonde’s pompous brother, Maximillian (Ben R. Eisler ’08) who is himself in love with someone not of his “sphere,” Pacquette (Alli C. Smith ’06). Over a long period of time, Candide keeps meeting Cundegonde (who ends up as a cabaret dancer after deciding to seek her own fortune around the world) but is rejected by her every time.

Written by Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Dorothy Parker, and Lillian Hellman, among others, Candide is traditionally an ambitious project to undertake musically, dramatically, and technically. Greenhalgh directs a cast of twenty student actors who must showcase diverse skills, ranging from the performance of kicklines to the singing of songs about syphilis over the span of two continents. For this reason, there are three producers—Joshua H. Billings ’07, Sherra T. Wong ’05 and Emily C. Zazulia ’06—rather than the two typical of Harvard productions. Daniel W. Chetel ’06 additionally serves as music director.

“I think that the general consensus is that [Candide] is almost too brilliant for its own good, that each part outshines the other part so much that sometimes it’s a little hard to wrap your arms around it,” says Greenhalgh. “That’s all been leveled against it as a shortcoming, but actually I think it makes it absolutely fantastic.”

However, given the fact that Candide is operating on a college budget, Greenhalgh saw the need to scale down and give unity to the show.

“The solution that we came up with, which I think works fantastically on many levels is to really embrace the Hollywood aspect of it and to show off much of it, and to allow much of [the presentation of Candide] to function as a show within a show. So much of the staging is meant to be a performance within a performance: the set of a movie, or an after-party,” explains Greenhalgh. “We deal with some of the more absurd elements of the opera by saying, ‘This is a show within a show.’ For the parts that feel more real, we bring it back into reality of the theater.”

She explains that this strategy “is a good way of adding dimension to the satire and avoiding just having the characters be caricatures. Instead, we have these characters that are allowed to operate on all levels and are very sincere.”

Greenhalgh receives praise from her cast for her creative and open-minded approach to the material. Hosfield elaborates, “Even though she doesn’t have a lot of experience, she’s really on top of everything, and because she doesn’t have a lot of experience, she’s really open to suggestions, open to collaboration and help.”

When asked who the standout of the show is, Hosfield and Kathy D. Gerlach ’07 unhesitatingly named the female lead, Hirner. A Dunster resident who has trained classically since 9th grade, Hirner possesses a pure and clear voice, and was the lead of DHO’s 2003 La Cenerentola.

Hirner says this year’s production will address last year’s complaints that the show did not involve many Dunster residents. “It’s very important, I think, to have Dunster residents involved because it kind of gives Dunster residents more reason to understand and support what’s going on here. Whether they end up liking it or not, [participation in DHO] becomes part of the daily life of Dunster people.”