Skip to content

Opera

Candide

No ratings yet

Wales Millennium Centre · Cardiff

Taught that this is the best of all possible worlds, a young man is thrown out of a Westphalian castle for loving the daughter of the house.

First Night is a theatre diary for logging the shows you've seen and discovering what to see next.

ComedySatire

The story

Leonard Bernstein's comic operetta, based on Voltaire's 1759 satirical novella, follows Candide, the illegitimate nephew of Baron Thunder-ten-Tronck, who loves Cunégonde, the Baroness's daughter, and has learned optimism from the philosopher Dr Pangloss. Exiled as a social inferior and separated from her by war, he crosses continents in search of Cunégonde, through the Lisbon earthquake, Paris and the New World, with each disaster testing Pangloss's teaching.

In the room

The story travels episodically from one country and catastrophe to the next, and Bernstein's score moves between styles, including a waltz, a tango, a barcarolle and a gavotte, alongside the coloratura showpiece Glitter and Be Gay.

Good fit if you like

satire aimed at blind optimism, picaresque travel stories and scores that sit between opera and musical theatre.

Details

From 17 Sept 2025

Running time not recorded.

Recent logs

Cast & crew

No cast or crew recorded yet.

Details are edited by First Night.