SOURCE: “Not Quite Utopia,” in New Yorker, Vol. 73, No. 12, May 19, 1997, pp. 98–99.

In the following review, Lahr gives a negative assessment of a revival of Candide, calling it degenerative from the onset and slow-moving. He also finds that the musical possesses an incoherence of orchestration and score.

Nobody can say that Voltaire didn't suffer for his wit. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for apparently spoofing the Regent, throttled by a courtier's henchman for his ridicule, and exiled from Paris for his acid thoughts about church and state. In the course of three weeks in 1758, at the age of sixty-four, he wrote his picaresque novella Candide; or, Optimism, which was a belly laugh at the Enlightenment notion of a harmonious Christian universe. Now, in Hal Prince's revival of the revival of the revised Leonard Bernstein–Lillian Hellman–Richard Wilbur 1956 musical version of Candide (at the Gershwin), we are made...