Tenor James McLennan switched from piano to voice
and hasn't looked back

by John Terauds, The Toronto Star, December 2006

As the curtain rises, the French philosopher Voltaire appears on stage to introduce four smiling youth "The happiest of them all was a young German whose face was an open book. The purity of whose soul shone through his eyes. And I think that's why they called him Candide."

Candide is in love with a baron's daughter, Cunegonde. All agree that this is "the best of all possible worlds."

This is an ideal setup for a frothy operetta. Except that nothing is as it seems in Voltaire's tale or in Leonard Bernstein's 1956 musical adaptation. The story is a surreal sequence of disasters that make the Baudelaire siblings' 13-book ordeal penned by the fictitious Lemony Snicket seem like a Sunday stroll at the mall.

Candide bristles with rudeness, violence and hard-biting satire on the state of the world, wrapped in Bernstein's typically exuberant score.

Dec. 1 marked the 50th anniversary of Candide opening on Broadway. On Wednesday, it gets a rare local production by Toronto Operetta Theatre, with shows through Jan.7.

Director Guillermo Silva-Marin has assembled a solid cast led by soprano Carla Huhtanen as Cunegonde and tenor James McLennan in the title role. The chamber orchestra is led by Julian Wachner.

Voltaire's intention in Candide, written in 1759, was to make fun of philosophers who insisted that man's free will could not influence life's outcomes. The novel's disasters cause Candide to finally realize that life is not preordained, but what we make of it.

Love is the binding metaphor. As the character says to Cunegonde at play's end, "The way we have loved we will not love again. We love now for what we are. We'll do as best we can."

Their final duet celebrates a quiet life together as they "make our garden grow."

To translate this roller coaster into two acts of stage dialogue was a challenge first taken up by Lillian Hellman. The lyricists included such witty wordsmiths as Dorothy Parker and Richard Wilbur. Yet the crazy-quilt result has never sat easily with either performers or audiences. Every major remount has made substantial revisions to the text and in the order songs are sung.

Coincidentally, a new production that opened in Paris earlier this month (and that will travel to La Scala in Milan during 2007 and the English National Opera in 2008) has a new book that links the story to current world figures and events, with a strong anti- American skew.

Silva-Marin has based his staging on a well-received production by England's Royal National Theatre in 1999.

"The version that we're doing is pretty faithful to the novel," says McLennan, who read Voltaire's original in high school. "The characters can seem out of this world, so the challenge for the actors is to make them seem real in this fantastical world of Voltaire and Bernstein."

McLennan thinks Candide is relevant today because "it talks of the hypocrisy of political ideology, of religion, fanaticism, violence."

"And it's hilarious," he adds. "It appeals on so many different levels and the music is great."

Toronto Operetta Theatre often casts young singers. And McLennan, now in his early 30s, is building a reputation as a promising young tenor. Appropriately, he is tending to his artistic garden, letting his vocal soil settle and the seedlings of a career take root.

The Winnipeg native's adult musical life started at Manitoba's Brandon University, followed by a graduate degree at University of British Columbia, a stint with Opera de Montreal's Atelier Lyrique apprentice program and workshops in Aspen, Colo., and Banff, Alta.

McLennan has performed opera, oratorio and art-song recitals. "In Canada you have to be pretty versatile," he says. Those with an eye for fringey shows might even have caught him in the madcap 1920s Berlin-inspired Cabaret Vulgare at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre a couple of years ago.

But he's getting serious now. "It's important to find a niche," says the singer, who is looking for 18th-century opera roles.

McLennan is based in Toronto now. "It's a really supportive community of singers here and it's a city where you can make a living as a singer."

He continues to see a vocal coach, even as he takes on more professional engagements. He wants to learn as many operatic roles as he can before setting his sights on Europe. "They want a package," he says, hoping that his resume will be ready to present abroad within the "next year to two years."

At that point, he'll "make a trip over there and take a few risks, spend some money ..."

McLennan's first risky move was making a sudden switch from piano performance to voice at Brandon more than a decade ago. "I know it sounds crazy and kind of dramatic," he recalls, "but four days before the audition (for the piano performance program), I thought, no, I think I want to be a singer." He made the necessary arrangements, and found that his teachers were supportive of the move.

And that's before he became a tenor. He started out as a baritone, but his teachers aimed higher.

"It was a long process," he says. "Training the tenor voice is always a challenge ... you have to be patient ...you've got to learn to trust your own instincts and learn to trust people who have your best interests at heart."

McLennan grew up in a musical family. His mother was an elementary and high-school teacher who liked to mount musicals and he performed in several during his teenage years.

He was bitten by the opera bug after seeing Franco Zeffirelli's 1982 film version of Verdi's La Traviata "I thought, wow, this is just like theatre. I didn't know opera could be so dramatic and that really turned me on."

Then he ran across a disc by famed Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling, who died in 1960. "I thought, if I can have a sound like that in my own head, wow!"

He's getting there. As proof, he'll be returning to Brandon University in the new year as a performer. McLennan and Toronto pianist Peter Tiefenbach will present Robert Schumann's art-song cycle Dichterliebe, surely anyone's measure of a well-tended vocal garden.