Performer: Patricia Racette

Stripped of melodramatic excess, soprano Patricia Racette and director James Darrah craft a portrait of a desperate, lonely woman that is uncomfortably, thrillingly human.

Chaotic staging detracts from imaginative pairing of Poulenc's songs with his one-act, one-performer opera. 

Candide is a witty satiric fable, intelligent, literary but not to a fault, and vastly entertaining. Created by a team of collaborators who fell out at different times in the work’s 52 year history – at one point or another, Lillian Hellman, Richard Wilbur, John Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Stephen Sondheim and, of course, composer Leonard Bernstein had a hand in it – it is unique in the operatic or