Quantum Theatre stages classics and plays that are largely unknown, often American premieres, in places no one thought to stage them before.

So Quantum's "Candide," opening tomorrow, is a bit of a twist, a well-known modern comic classic staged at a site we've been looking at for years, the electric blue auto palace on Baum Boulevard, the former Don Allen Auto City.

Note that "former." All the signage is gone and even the electric blue, as the defunct Chevrolet emporium awaits the developer's wrecking ball. In the meantime, the owners, the Volker family, have become patrons of the arts, recently hosting a scene of the movie, "Love and Other Drugs," and now Quantum.

Just as "Candide" takes place in fictional corners of the real 18th century world, Don Allen is at the confusing junction of Bloomfield, Friendship and Shadyside. But Pittsburghers are used to following directions based on defunct landmarks. This is one Quantum event where no one will get lost hunting some obscure Mon Valley byway. It even has a convenient parking lot.

The performance site is the auto body shop in the rear, where Quantum's indomitable techies have built a donut-shaped stage, placing the orchestra of eight in the middle, surrounded by cascading platforms -- a circle inside an oval inside a rectangle.

In case you think it's a stretch to place Voltaire's comic masterpiece in an auto body shop, director Karla Boos claims Quantum has discovered some car-related joke "about every 30 seconds -- without changing a word of the text. ... Our approach is light-hearted."

For example, the religious executions Candide witnesses are called an auto-da-fe. And the utopia in mid-play, the mythical city of gold, El Dorado, is matched by Tom Rohrich's own 1976 mint-condition white Cadillac El Dorado, complete with red and white leather innards, enticingly parked beside that doughnut-stage.

The site and that mouth-watering El Dorado aside, any play is really about its people. This "Candide" is the love child of Boos and music director Andres Cladera, but it began with the skeptic Voltaire, a caustic polymath who walked a narrow line between popularity and persecution in an ideologically cantankerous age. His satiric 1759 "philosophical tale" was a hit from the start, running through 20 editions in its original French in its first year alone, along with three in English translation.

Voltaire's little "philosophical tale" was in trouble with the censors from the start, being banned in Boston as late as 1929. Perhaps the best early parallel is Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," which Voltaire knew. Modern analogies would be "Brave New World" or the works of Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut or John Barth.

In 1956 it was adapted for the Broadway musical stage by Bernstein (score), Lillian Hellman (book) and Richard Wilbur, Dorothy Parker and John La Touche (lyrics), directed by Tyrone Guthrie. It ran for just 73 performances, which suggests it was just too good for its audience, or perhaps Hellman's book was too dark.

Bernstein's music, however, is brilliant. So Broadway tried again in 1974, with a streamlined book by Hugh Wheeler ("A Little Night Music," "Sweeney Todd"). Wilbur was credited with the lyrics, with contributions by Bernstein and John La Touche; Hal Prince directed; and it ran a healthy 740 performances.

For the 1997 Broadway revival, Stephen Sondheim joined the lyricists and new orchestrations were provided by Pittsburgher John Mauceri. The run was just 104 performances, but by now "Candide" was a classic American operetta, if that isn't a contradiction in terms.

The story follows the naive Candide and a small group of friends across several continents, subjecting them to real horrors such as torture, the cataclysmic Lisbon earthquake and religious war. And yet the tone is deadpan funny, with Bernstein's brilliant music, a parody of operetta as much as the thing itself, adding humor of its own.

The chief satiric target is philosophic schemes that try to explain away the horrors of life, especially mindless optimism. But the tonic effect of Voltaire's tough-minded cynicism is an optimism of its own. And the music soars.

To start, Boos planned to work with CMU's Robert Page, but he steered her to Cladera. Coincidentally, he's from Montevideo, Uruguay, one of the locations in Voltaire's tale. He came to Pittsburgh in 2000 to earn a masters at CMU and has made his career here. And he loves the Quantum mode of unusual performance spaces.

"He showed me some where even I said no," Boos admits.

"I'm passionate about taking the beauty of art to places you wouldn't normally see it," Cladera says.

For this "Candide" he insisted on real singing throughout, not on speaking to music. And he transposed the full Broadway score for what he calls a "chamber ensemble," in which every instrumentalist is also a soloist.

They're also performers, engaged in the action. "We use them all the time," says Boos. "Most companies create the music separately from the staging," but not here. "I don't ever want to work any other way."

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.