book by Hugh Wheeler (A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd), fared much better. It ran almost two years and won eight Tony awards, including one for Wheeler. His is the version Alliance audiences will see. Booth’s connection to Candide dates to her days onstage as an undergraduate at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. She says she “had absolutely no idea what I was singing about until we got to the end.” She’s determined not to replicate that experience for either actors or audience. “It’s dense, sure, but it’s not impenetrable.”
Puppet master Matt Acheson’s “toys” include a volcano that erupts, wooden boxes that create mechanical waves, and a cosmic switchboard with “disasters and miracles” on it. He provides the horrors that Candide finds everywhere he goes: war, poverty, a tsunami, earthquakes, fire and countless examples of man’s inhumanity to man. 10 ALLIANCE THEATRE | ALLIANCETHEATRE.ORG
A’RIEL TINTER
But Booth, who directs, likes a challenge. “The older I get, the more the ‘impossible’ is like catnip,” she says. “Some people climb mountains. I try to do things I have no idea how to do. This would be the latter.” Candide, a musical theater/opera hybrid has been fiddled with a great deal since its 1956 Broadway premiere, which ran a mere two months (but did showcase a young Barbara Cook as Cunegonde). Among other criticisms, playwright Lillian Hellman’s script was considered too serious for Voltaire’s intent. A 1974 Broadway revival, with a new