What fortuitous programming it was by Victorian Opera to have a new production of Candide (1956) open just as interest in the composer of its delicious score peaks in the wake of Bradley Cooper’s biopic Maestro. Just as fortuitously, the production is a triumph; an auspicious start for incoming artistic director, Stuart Maunder. It makes as strong a case as one might for the value of opera companies taking on such repertoire.

Unlike West Side Story (1957), the stage work for which Bernstein is best known, Candide (first presented on Broadway) is much more of a music-theatre/opera hybrid. It was not an immediate stage success, which led the composer and a growing team of librettists to rework it several times over subsequent years. In part that speaks to the sheer cheek of the original idea, turning Voltaire’s eponymous, meandering, satirical novella into a work of music theatre. So many things would seem to speak against it as a suitable topic for such an adaption.