‘Candude’ Can Do It Like Pros

No troupe enfolds the community into its work with more charm than Cornerstone Theater Company. “Candude”--Tracy Young’s pleasantly warped and updated version of Voltaire’s “Candide”--is populated mostly by talented amateur actors who by day are librarians, police officers or employees at the post office and transit authority. The underrated nature of civil service becomes a leitmotif--the upright hero, Candude (played by professional Christopher Liam Moore), works diligently at the library, the post office and as a bus driver. He makes speeches about the value of these jobs.

But the cast members themselves are the best spokesmen for their own worth. Most of them are terrific--natural hams and comedians. Under the direction of Shishir Kurup, they have a wonderful collective presence, an innocence peppered with life experience and full-grown idiosyncrasies. The material, complete with songs, is loose and wacky, allowing room for the slight hesitations characteristic of the amateur actor. But “Candude” never feels like amateur theater; there are pros at the helm, and they are running the show. Inexperience is stage-managed in the name of art.

The real star of “Candude,” subtitled “The Optimistic Civil Servant,” is its setting--the Central Public Library between Hope and Flower streets in downtown Los Angeles, a building with many whimsical delights that are utilized nicely by this piece of roving theater.

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The audience is shuffled around by guides, some of whom double as actors or as human lighting packs--men with iron grids on their backs who walk around illuminating the scenes. As we view scenes staged outside, in the foyer and on the second floor, we are serenaded by two strolling musicians (Joe Romano and David Markowitz) who play songs by, variously, Romano, Young, Kurup, Kyle Gass and Laurence O’Keefe. The peripatetic staging is perfect for Candide, whose episodic adventures take him all over the globe, or, in Candude’s case, all around Los Angeles environs.

Three Cornerstone members anchor the cast. Moore overdoes Candude’s innocence; he is perpetually wide-eyed and has a pronounced lisp. In the role of Candude’s true love, here called Page Tome, Page Leong also exaggerates her character’s youthful innocence and, later, marketable sexuality. As the eternally optimistic Dr. Pangloss, Peter Howard concludes every sentence with a manic exclamation point, to match the happy faces on his tie. These three set a tone that the nonprofessionals emulate with ease.

“Candude” is wrapped in a goofy glow. Kurup fills the evening with surprises. As in Voltaire, Dr. Pangloss insists that this is the best of all possible worlds, a childlike philosophy he sings to us while we sit in tiny seats and watch a puppet show in the little theater off of the children’s library. The scene ends in a pretend fire, during which Candude is banished from the library and from his beloved Page. Incorporating the library’s actual history into her text, Young sets the scene in 1986, when two arson blazes damaged the library, closing it for seven years.

Standouts in an all-around wonderful cast include Deborah Strayhand (a library clerk-typist) who performs a hilarious bit as a furious postal worker demanding to be told what “disgruntled” means. Keith Chaffee (a librarian, who says in his bio he is acting to “heal his inner diva”) plays a variety of roles, most of them evil, with joy and flair. Lorraine Lucero (a postal worker) had a nice, flat deadpan as Page’s maid, the derriere-challenged character known in Voltaire as “the old woman.”

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The glorious rotunda with its Dean Cornwell murals on the second floor and its adjoining hallways are used for a series of scenes. If the sound there is problematic, the company more than makes up for it with its spirited use of these wonderful spaces. Candude, the wanderer, delivering a line to the globe chandelier, is ingenuous. Seeing the library at night and in new contexts is better than discovering it for the first time. But the coup of site-specific staging comes at the end, when Cornerstone takes us outside onto Hope Street, where we started, for a simple and spectacular finale. “It’s a street we can all walk on any time we want!” proclaims our guileless hero. The scene offers a cinematic long shot longer than anything possible on the world’s largest stage. Here, Cornerstone proves definitively that it has made the city its stage.

* “Candude, or the Optimistic Civil Servant,” Los Angeles Central Public Library, 630 W. 5th St., Thursday-Friday, Sundays-Mondays, 7:30 p.m. Ends June 30. Pay what you can. (310) 449-1700. Running time: 2 hours.