Giles Woodforde finds much to enjoy in Leonard Bernstein's little-seen musical Candide

The cast of Candide

Two fascinating rarities in a row: last week the Oxford Playhouse staged Terence Rattigan's long neglected After the Dance. This week the theatre hosts Oxford Operatic Society's production of Candide, Voltaire's short story as set to music by Leonard Bernstein. Unless you saw the European premiere, which took place at Oxford's New Theatre (now the Apollo) in 1959, it's a fair bet that only the zippy overture will be familiar.

At the centre of Bernstein's Candide is a Spanish auto-da-fe, an "act of faith" in which the Catholic Church - via the Inquisition - would routinely torture and murder so-called "heretics". As Bernstein scored numbers such as Life is Happiness Indeed, The Best of All Possible Worlds, and O Happy We, the McCarthy witch-hunts, intended to root out any American even vaguely suspected of being a Communist, were surely fresh in his mind. The parallels with Voltaire's original story need no underlining.

But how do you get audiences to go and see a show based on such subject matter, even if the treatment is satirical? With difficulty it seems - Candide has never been a commercial success, even though Bernstein's answer was to use humour and caricature. Oxford Operatic use a 1973 revised version (book by Hugh Wheeler), in which a narrator (Edward Simpson) introduces us to Candide himself (Graham Watt, suitably wet behind the ears), and to the object of his affection, the virginal Cunegonde (Sarah Leatherbarrow, giving the star singing performance of the evening).

We also meet, among many others, distinctly odd Maximillian (Jonathan Cooper), saucy maid Paquette (Isobel McCall) and a nameless old lady (Sylvia Patterson), who enthusiastically offers sexual favours whenever it's to her advantage: "How maddening at this moment to be a eunuch," proclaims a potential customer in his fractured English just as a deal is about to be done.

Meanwhile Danny O'Brien goes splendidly over the top as a lecherous Governor of Buenos Aires, who discovers right at the last minute that a potential conquest is actually a man in drag.

There is indeed plenty of bawdy humour here, but quite correctly, director Jackie Keirs emphasises that this is very much a bittersweet show, with music that seems to send up The Merry Widow one minute, then delves into dark corners and unsettling keys a few bars later. This most certainly isn't another West Side Story (Bernstein unveiled this classic musical just a year later), nor is everyone in this production up to the considerable acting and singing challenges involved. But all praise to the Society for wheeling out Candide and giving local audiences a rare chance to see it for themselves.