I love “Candide” and Bernstein’s score, but as you probably may have read on the blog, I was ambivalent about Mary Zimmermann’s production which premiered at the Goodman and transferred to Arena and Huntington.

Looking forward to more theater-going exchanges in 2012!

A theater company near me is doing Festen in January, so I’m really looking forward to it.

Also, I want to give a shoutout to another Chicago production, Candide, which I saw at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston and made my list of favorites for 2011. It was my first time seeing the musical and I thought the score was glorious and the story was so entertaining.

That being said, I believe it’s these same monkeys on the back (harangues? phobias?) that make it completely hard for any minority to author a work that deals with questions about their position in society. In my experience, they either blow it out of proportion because they undyingly need to be heard so much or they are almost mocking and derogatory, as Hwang’s Song and Xu may be. Very few hit the pantheon of accuracy – August Wilson, some Suzan Lori-Parks – and they do so because they have a story to tell, which in itself proves a point, rather than set out to prove a point, and then piece the plot together.

But, one might argue, better to start a conversation than remain stuck in erroneous symbolism, right? It’s the same way we feel about Next’s Thai presentation. Without the innate cultural background, you can only accept what the artist is providing you as the Dickensian truth. To truly appreciate the arts, the audience needs to school themselves so that watching a production is interactive, rather than reactive. However, not everyone has that opportunity nor privilege nor impetus, so the role as creator is important – and allows for playing god. And that is why you create – so you can have an opinion, and it’s important to start the conversation, and it’s just as important for the recipients to question.