THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

Clocking in at three hours—the blink of an eye for a Mary Zimmerman show—the Candide currently occupying the Goodman's Alfred is either an overfed musical or a streamlined opera, depending on your taxonomy. But don't be fooled by the powdered wigs, fluffy skirts and ersatz-Rossini flourishes. Decades before Sir Andrew and Sir Elton, Leonard Bernstein—a composer of unimpeachable classical cred—joined forces with Molière-scholar/poet Richard Wilbur, playwright Hugh Wheeler and a bevy of tweakers to breach the boundaries between music leet and pop.

Director/adapter Zimmerman is likewise no stranger to translating cumbersome literary epics to fluid sensory spectacle, her imagination this time shaping Voltaire's picaresque tale of an innocent youth's progress through a naughty world until it emerges as a carnival of panoramic imagery conveying all of the author's geographical fancies, but sacrificing none of his still-timely satirical observations. Most of these occur in another of scenic designer Daniel Ostling's wood-paneled vaults whose walls, floor and ceiling pop open to reveal the various stations in Candide's search for the perfect world promised by his teachers—a futile quest encompassing three continents, several seagoing voyages and companions rich and poor, honest and corrupt, lucky and ill-starred.

But as they say in Spain, "Caballo grande/ande o no ande" ( "whether it runs or not, it's a big horse" ) . The episodic nature of Voltaire's narrative dictates that characters never learn from their mistakes, making a degree of repetition inevitable as friends previously thought deceased resurface in unlikely circumstances. Zimmerman's characteristic technical legerdemain—stick puppets, watery silk scarves, stenciled slide-projections—is now familiar to her home-town audiences ( although El Dorado's crimson sheep steal the show ) . And in 2010, the 54-year-old score relies on auditory nostalgia as much as on its own merits.

But thanks to the athletic ensemble, the slow moments engendered by the many transitional scenes are negligible. Goeff Packard and Lauren Molina warble their way through the stylistically eclectic score with aplomb ( the latter trilling her multi-octave way through a cadenza-riddled aria while being laced into her corsets—take that, Kristin Chenoweth ) . But the evening belongs to Hollis Resnik as the aged crone who's seen it all; Larry Yando as the dryly casuistic Dr. Pangloss; and an ensemble of protean actors impersonating everything from Venetian clergy to Surinamese monkeys.