"With Mr. Prince’s inventive, reworked staging, some tweaks and trims and other changes, not to mention a winning cast drawn from both theater and opera, this 'Candide' represents an encouraging forward step for the reconstituted company...No production, including this one, manages completely to resolve the stylistic tensions built into 'Candide'...But Mr. Prince keeps the storytelling focused and the stage action animated, especially during some wonderfully intricate ensemble scenes."
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"The numbers still speed along, and pauses for reflection go by too fast to touch the heart…Cast with a mix of opera and musical-theater performers, all amplified. For the most part, the opera singers had the edge…Prince led the orchestra in a workmanlike, rather stolid performance…The score, as always, is a masterpiece...There have been numerous rethinkings of 'Candide' in the past 35 years and this might have been an opportunity to look ahead, rather than indulge in nostalgia."
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"Is it opera? Musical theater? Call it what you will, 'Candide' taps gleefully into each of those disparate worlds, offering an effervescent tonic in trying times. It all but fizzes before your eyes...The production is deftly anchored by Broadway veteran Edelman...The revelation is Picerno...Choreographer Birch contributes to the elegant segues in a challenging onslaught of crowded scene changes; and Charles Prince conducts with ear and baton finely attuned to the complicated goings-on."
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"The score is extraordinary, but the multiple rewrites have demonstrated the difficulty of balancing the score with an episodic structure, satirical edge and political commentary...Prince's production is overstuffed and overcrowded but often entertaining. At my performance last weekend, the cast still seemed to be finding its way and much of the humor failed to land."
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"This particular mounting, using designs and staging that date back more than 30 years, feels more like an ‘old warhorse’ than a piece that's truly alive…This iteration feels as though the director wasn't heavily involved. The laughs rarely land, the physical production looked shopworn, and the ensemble just looked tired. Throughout, it resembles a Broadway show in the middle of a long run, desperate for freshening up after being in the hands of associates for several months."
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"A rollicking production…Wheeler's much-improved book, tight as a drum for the first half, is retained...The storytelling tends to drag during the second...But happily the text is never less than witty and engaging. The terrific cast is composed of performers who not only do justice to the music, but who also get the cleverness of the lyrics and dialogue…If this sparkling mounting is any indication, New York City Opera is set to start achieving fuller grandness in 2017."
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"The rift between what you feel (too little) and what you hear (too much) rapidly becomes a bug rather than a feature, with its various components waging a kind of bewildering civil war...Even so, the largely spectacular cast ensures it goes down easily...Alas, even when everything is right...a pervasive wrongness still makes its presence unavoidably felt. Prince has...done all he can to wrangle this beast, and his success at achieving that goal is obvious, even if the point of doing so isn't."
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"The actors try valiantly to fend for themselves with expressions ranging from mournful to bemused to goofy. Couldn't Prince or Patricia Birch on the dances have found something for them to do other than just stand there?"
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