Ok, y’all. Now this is a rare occasion. I’m posting a “TO DO” for a major venue. But you must, I mean, MUST go see Candide at NYC Opera. It opens tonight and runs for about a week and a half.

Now, I haven’t seen this production, so, I can’t speak for that (it is, however, a Hal Prince joint, so it will surely at least be fanciful), but Leonard Bernstein’s score not only has some of the most wonderfully dangerous music that has been written for the theater (it’s a lot like Sondheim’s A Little Night Music the way it straddles musical theater and operetta), but it also represents how tonal composition in the age of serial dogma (”Candide was written in 1956) still had a way of standing out with originality, panache, and honed compositional skill.

But aside from the theorizing, the music is simply too hot not to be enjoyed. And who couldn’t love a little “Glitter and Be Gay”?…