TOO SWEET SUITE

This is the story of a particular opera opera critic who was really quite a purist. He rarely approved of any production that didn't remain true to the original scripting, costumes or settings. By far the most disturbing variants for him to suffer through were productions  where a director had attempted to "lighten up" a piece by adding unnecessary humorous schtick, puns or pratfalls. Probably the most outraged he ever became was that time he attended a staging of the Leonard Bernstein operetta based on a Voltaire story. The director had embellished the script with numerous additional bits of wordplay and puns, and most of it was really lame stuff. Later the reviewer said he felt like rushing home to brush his teeth because he'd just spent three hours chewing on Candide corn.

Gary Hallock