Word: pangloss
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Voltaire's tale of innocence and catastrophe prances through the theater as if it were the wide, exuberantly evil world itself. Mark Baker's puppylike Candide and his beloved Cunegonde (Maureen Brennan) begin in the radiant sweetness of their Westphalia, instructed of course in Dr. Pangloss's invincible doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds. What follows in Voltaire's gleeful vision is a string of unmitigated but somehow good-natured disasters-banishment, war, scourging, mass slaughter, piracy, the Spanish Inquisition, slavery, concubinage-until at last the wanderers come to El Dorado. Leading...
Presiding over the action is Lewis Stadlen, who plays the geriatric Voltaire, the buoyant Pangloss and assorted villains. The set, which might have been a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and the sculptor Jean Tinguely, turns in its own virtuoso performance. It throws down bridges between continents, cascades green streamers down to simulate jungle, and rocks like a storm-battered ship. Despite such assaults, the audience is treated with a kind of 18th century courtesy and just the right note of complicity. If there could be a lovelier Candide than this, it is difficult to imagine...
...fire started by the careless toss of a lit match damaged the cellar of the Pangloss Book Shop yesterday...
...about 5:15 p.m. the Cambridge Fire Department responded to a report of smoke at Pangloss and arrived at the building across from Widener Library with two aerial towers, four engines and one rescue unit...
...fire destroyed many of the books stored in the cellar of Pangloss," Faith Mattison, manager of the shop, said yesterday, "but we don't as yet know the extent of the damage...