Candide

OGRE? I DON’T EVEN KNOW HER Freilich gives Lanning some worldly advice.

In its bawdily inventive new staging of Bernstein’s Candide, Porchlight Music Theatre takes an unexpected risk. Instead of producing the rich light opera with typical majesty—this is as close as the American musical ever credibly got to formal opera—the company reduces an entire pit’s worth of orchestrations to a more percussive bump-n-grind affair, and treats Voltaire’s story of a lucky simpleton who walks obliviously through natural disasters and the Inquisition like it’s a roadhouse burlesque show. But with the exception of Bernstein purists hoping to hear a full complement of instruments playing the wedding cake of a score, this skeletal urban take on Candide—both passionately sung and at times genuinely funny—might help Porchlight find a new fleet of fans.

It’s a step forward for the company, which in the past has always offered clean, unfettered vocal presentations of important American musicals but has struggled to present design and production value on a level competitive with the city’s Equity theater companies. With no gaudy sets to distract the eye and with costume designer Bill Morey adding just the right level of self-aware cheekiness, Stearns’s staging relies only on his actors’ muscular silhouettes against black concrete walls; it’s a reverse-engineered look in the mold of Sam Mendes’s stripped-down Cabaret and the work of John Doyle, the intensely minimalist director responsible for the most recent Sondheim craze. And then you have the voices: Girolmo in a seemingly effortless yeoman’s performance as narrator Dr. Pangloss; honey-tenored, doofus-faced Lanning as Candide; garishly funny gypsy Freilich as the old lady; and full-throated Shirley-Temple-gone-brothel Collins, whose “Glitter and Be Gay” stops the show in a manner typically reserved for fire alarms.