STAGE REVIEW : Candidly, This ‘Candide’ Blurs After First Act

Rancho Santiago College’s Professional Actors Conservatory sidles up to “Candide” like a tipsy conventioneer looking for a party. Director Victor Pappas never lets up in keeping the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim musical adaptation of Voltaire’s classic satire a giddy, vaudevillian experience.

That’s fine--for about the first act. The silliness is good fun at the outset, when the broad but often fresh style and Pappas’ hard-working cast mesh nicely. But, as the tempo hardly shifts, the ride eventually takes on a redundant quality.

To be sure, there are some kicky moments, such as three actors simulating a volcano eruption (fast stepping and panicky faces), and the talented Betsy Ferguson as Cunegonde does a little second-act dancing a la Lucille Ball (or was she doing Gilda Radner doing Lucille Ball?). Unfortunately, much of the rest blurs together.

“Candide” was first staged in 1956 under the guidance of such luminaries as Lillian Hellman, Richard Wilbur, Dorothy Parker and Leonard Bernstein, and later, in the 1974 Harold Prince-directed revival, included lyrics by Sondheim. At its center, though, has always been Voltaire’s clever tweaking of the prevailing view of his day: mainly a Manichean state of mind that believed in a moral world where evil is overcome by good.

In “Candide,” good never gets the upper hand, bad tramples it every time, and Fate seems interested only in hard times.

Take Candide (Pete Benson), a naive man-child in love with the chaste Cunegonde. He has set off on an odyssey that involves one brutality after another.

While Candide is being kidnaped, beaten and you name it, Cunegonde is raped by a regiment of marauders and later becomes a prostitute and concubine. Their teacher, the resolutely sunny Pangloss (Sam Zeller, who also plays Voltaire, among other roles) suffers his own fair share of earthly abuse.

To handle all the musical’s happenings and his own ideas, Pappas and set coordinator Thomas Buderwitz have built a ramped stage that encircles the audience, which is seated in four separate areas. This arrangement makes for a feeling of immediacy, but it also requires a fair amount of seat-shifting and head-swiveling.

‘CANDIDE’

A Rancho Santiago College Professional Actors Conservatory production. Directed by Victor Pappas. With Sam Zeller, Pete Benson, Betsy Ferguson, Dionysius Burbano, B. Aaron Cogan, Lizbeth Lucco, Adrienne L. Cooper, Kimberly M. Davis, Glynna Goff, Max Goldberg, Darin Heames, Jeff King, Jim Linde, Jim Rice, Mark Rosenthal, Kristin Scheimer, Mark Talley, Chris Williams, Terri Zimbelman. Set by Thomas Buderwitz. Musical direction by Kathleen Bradley-Najarian. Choreography by Cyrus Parker-Jeannette. Costumes by Karen J. Weller. Lighting by Gary Christensen. Sound by Michael Killen. Plays Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m., with a Saturday matinee at 2 p.m. at 333 S. Prospect Ave., Orange. Tickets: $6 to $10. (714) 667-3163.