When the New York City Opera played its last, ill-fated season at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion four years ago, it was a company in obvious trouble.  The repertory had become stale, the performances were ragged and, artistic reins having just passed from Julius Rudel to Beverly Sills, the leadership did not seem exactly solid.  Now, if we can believe what we read and hear, all that has changed.  Drastically. 

Sills has revitalized company spirits as well as output.  Even more important, perhaps, she has achieved something of a 20th-Century miracle: financial stability.  Back at Lincoln Center, the City Opera has enjoyed remarkable successes with Puccini's seldom-played La Rondine, with a new look at Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, with a series of romantic French revivals including Werther, Cendrillon and Don Quichotte.  Sills and friends have traced the progress of Stravinsky's Rake and the gaga dada of Philip Glass' Akhnaten.  They also have undertaken at least one gutsy socio-political adventure: an opera by Anthony Davis based on the life of Malcolm X. 

Interesting.  Interesting. 

And what did the company bring to the Orange County Performing Arts Center this month for its long-awaited return to Southern California?  First there was Carmen, with mediocre casts straitjacketed in the updated, gimmicky, drab, anti-musical production of Frank Corsaro.  Yawn.  Then there was a tired rehash of the standard-brand Madama Butterfly first seen in Los Angeles 20 years ago.  Two yawns.  Finally, there was Leonard Bernstein's problematic but often inspired Candide in the same bloated, heavy-handed, circus-oriented production we endured in 1982.  Two-and-a-half yawns. 

Although attendance figures are high, Sills has complained — with some justification — that her company isn't always well received here.  By the same unhappy token, enlightened observers might complain that the company doesn't always show itself to best advantage here.  The Candide that rambled onward if not upward for an endless 2 hours and 40 minutes Tuesday night at Segerstrom Hall suffered, once again, from a stylistic identity crisis. 

This edition, you will recall, is not the musical-comedy that flickered briefly but brilliantly on Broadway in 1956.  Nor is it the tight and snazzy reduction that enjoyed considerable success in New York in 1973.  This is candy-coated Voltaire in a presumably grand-operatic setting.  This is Bernstein's Voltaire as performed by serious, classically enlightened musicians.  It sounds nice on paper. 

What the City Opera has given us, unfortunately, is a burlesque romp that values sight gags more than the score.  It is a Candide that retrieves a lot of music from its rightful place on the cutting-room floor, introduces miles of inane dialogue, and is so busy trying to be clever that it tramples some of Bernstein's most affecting inspirations.  Candide isn't Parsifal, although it sometimes seems as long.  It doesn't have to be approached with hoary reverence.  Still, one would have thought that a bona fide opera company would savor the orchestral subtleties and the lyrical flights as much as the fun-house divertissements. 

No such luck.  Essentially, New York has concocted a show instead of an opera.  It emerges as Harold Prince's Candide more than Bernstein's. 

The trouble begins half way through the marvelous overture, when the cast bursts noisily upon the scene in an onslaught of theatrical indulgences that obliterate the music.  The trouble continues when Candide is sent into the audience — isn't this daring and hilarious? — to sing his introspective ballad "It Must Be So" on the laps of the folks in the third row.  The composer observed a careful distinction between eloquent innocence and clever dark humor.  The director ignores the distinction, and makes everything cute and dizzy and coy, even the love music. 

Well, not quite everything.  At the very end — when the laff riots have finally subsided, when the diligent actors have stopped popping up in the most unexpected places, when Clarke Dunham's street-theater scenery has stopped jumping and heads have stopped spinning, when the cast of seeming-thousands has stopped quick-changing Judith Dolan's rainbow costumes — then Prince suddenly gets all mushy. 

The principals wipe away their smirks, join hands and look oddly beatific.  The backdrop rises to reveal a kitsch-postcard vista of fjords.  It is apotheosis time, time to extol peaceful and sentimental virtues: "Make Our Garden Grow."  Somehow, in context, it doesn't quite ring true. 

The generally frantic cast (now rehearsed by Arthur Masella) has a hard time sustaining a light touch.  Under the circumstances, that isn't surprising.  The problem is compounded by Segerstrom Hall, which is too large for this fragile opus, and by acoustical conditions that make the spoken dialogue difficult to understand.  Still, the participants deserve more applause than they got Tuesday night.  Cris Groenendaal, mannish rather than boyish, exudes proper innocence in the title role and sings with sweet fervor.  Leigh Munro is amply glittery and gay in the coloratura pyrotechnics of Cunegonde, and she goes through her arch Shirley-Temple charades with aplomb.  Portraying a crisp old Voltaire and a many-faced Pangloss, John Lankson functions deftly as narrator, philosopher, puppeteer and dernier danseur. 

The huge supporting cast enlists Muriel Costa-Greenspon as the amusingly grotesque, sadly voiceless Old Lady, Scott Reeve as the endearingly narcissistic Maximilian and Deborah Darr as his innocent sex-bomb sister.  James Billings (the nasty little guy) and Jack Harrold (the nasty fat guy) provide additional comic relief in a number of inter-related cliche guises.  Scott Bergeson does what can be done to sustain musical sanity, and momentum, in the pit.  Clearly, this isn't the best of all possible operas.

Opera Theatre of St. Louis's 1994 season opened festively with the first American performance of Leonard Bernstein's final version of Can­dide.  My visit to the eompany's home - the Loretto-Hilton center on the Webster University campus - began with the triumphant end of the Candide run on Junc 23.  Given Stephen Lord's efficient conducting, Colin Graham's witty but also pathos-conscious staging, a flawless cast, and a St. Louis Symphony contingent in the pit, it was hard not to agree with any Panglossian spirit hovering about that this was surely the best of all possible Candides.

Not that "best possible" means "perfect." I doubt that any of the several (near dozen?) versions of Candide were completely ideal.  Certainly none of the productions I saw was, including the 1956 Broadway original.  That version was blessed by the very newness of Bernstein's recklessly abundant score and a strong cast, whose brightest light was Barbara Cook's still unequaled (as far as I know) Cunegonde.  What spoiled things back then were Tyrone Guthrie's often cluttered and heavy-footed staging and some equally heavy-fiooted portions of Lillian Hell­man's book - not to be confused with the quicksilver lyrics by Rich­ard Wilbur, John La Touche, Dorothy Parker, Bernstein, and Hellman.

In the 1950's Hellman's work was shadowed and sometimes un­balanced by her experiences with the McCarthy witch-hunts, and, with Candide, she too often brushed aside Voltaire's fanciful flights in favor of her own blud­geoning anger.  The generously annotated St. Louis program book prints an inquisition-scene excerpt parodying McCarthy that was cut hefore the pre-Broadway Boston tryout.  I think more should have been thrown out.  But anyone who saw the 1956 show must now re­gret that Hellman's subsequent ban on staging any of her book deprived future audiences of a fi­nal scene wherein Cunegonde, as in Voltaire, showed herself to be a bit­ter, shrewish woman in the face of poverty.  Cook chilled the Martin Beck Theater the afternoon I saw her do that scene, a chill that only the "garden" finale could warm up.  Bernstein once told me he thought that was the best scene Hellman ever wrote in her entire career.  And one virtue of Colin Graham's St. Louis production is that he at least hinted at Cunegonde's explosion.

Why even this latest version is flawed has to do with the substitute book director Harold Prince invited Hugh Wheeler to write.  Yes, it's jokey, professional, easy to act, and friendly to a lazy audience, but over the last 20 years of revivals that began at BAM and included New York City Opera since 1982, I've become fed up with it.  So, I'm told, was Bernstein, at least in part.  He had no choice, however, other than to include at least some of it in this present, "definitive" version first produced in 1988 by Scottish Op­era and after a lot of through com­posing of bridges and some rhyth­mic reconstructing, recorded a year later in London, for the first time ever under the composer's baton.

With a bit less Wheeler and a lot of restored Bernstein, including the best of all possible syphilis-­song alternatives Bernstein composed over the years (the hilari­ously comprehensive "Dear Boy"), this is the Candide to at­tend.  As recently reported here, Boston gets it next March.  (Un­luckily, Chicago gets Harold Prince's 1982 version this fall.) To get more specific about the St. Louis cast.  Kevin Anderson's Candide sang the great lament over Cunegonde's supposed corpse more heartrendingly than I'd ever heard it.  Constance Hau­man (like City Opera's Lisa Saffer) came very close to chal­lenging my memory of Barbara Cook, especially in "Glitter and Be Gay." John Stephens was a tower of charm, wit, wisdom, fool­ishness, and bad temper, depend­ing on whether he was porlraying Voltaire, Pangloss, Martin, or Cacambo.  Josepha Gayer, Steven Combs, Brad Creswell, and the rest made joyful, musical noises unto the ghosts of Voltaire, Bernstein, Hellman, and even Wheeler.

The original production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide flopped in 1956.  In the composer's mind, the piece never came round right until the seventh and final revision of 1988; Boston Lyric Opera is currently performing the Boston premiere of this last version at the Emerson Majestic Theatre, right around the corner from the Colonial, where the journey started.  The final revised Candide would stand little chance of running even 76 performances in 1995.  You could view this as a sad commentary on today's Broadway audience, but today's Broadway audience wouldn't be wrong; even some of the Lyric's crowd bailed out before the end of the first act.  Candide is a seriously flawed and basically untheatrical piece that resisted the best efforts of the superb cast the Lyric assembled.

Voltaire's novel Candide is a work that doesn't ask to be dramatized — it is a conceptual comedy in which the story whizzes all over the world to make the same point repeatedly; this is not the best of all possible worlds, and the only thing to do about it is to stay home and cultivate our own gardens.  Voltaire's world was not our own — yet it is. War, disease, cruelty, greed, religious hypocrisy, inquisitions and imperialism are all still with us.

Candide is satire, and satire requires complicity — Jonathan Swift defined satire as "a laugh in a corner among friends."  But there is no one or nothing in the operetta Candide to be complicit with — no character, no narrative voice to identify with; the whole thing unfurls as a distant, repetitive and preachy pageant.

The original Broadway book by Lillian Hellman understood the problem and wrestled with it.  Her effort was to make something stageworthy of the story and to generate satire through character, dialogue and situation.  The replacement book by Hugh Wheeler, touched up by John Wells, simply sidesteps the problem.  There is very little meaningful dialogue.  Voltaire appears as character and narrator, but this stage figure is not recognizable as the great French philosopher, always grinding his teeth, as Flaubert put it.  He's more like Ed Sullivan hosting a variety show, setting the scene for the next big number.  Welcome to Lisbon, now Buenos Aires, now Venice, and if it's "Glitter and Be Gay," we must be in Paris, France, because that's what she says when she sings.

So the final version of Candide is basically a series of musical numbers flapping clothespinned to the flimsy string of a narrated plot.  Those musical numbers are a whole variety show in themselves — Bernstein was a thieving magpie, and Gilbert & Sullivan consort with Haydn, Copland and Stravinsky, not always so easily assimilated.  Bernstein's best work is deft, and a couple of numbers deserve the popularity they have won — particularly "Glitter and Be Gay," the duet "O happy pair" and the waltz, "What's the Use?"  But Bernstein's strong suit was not letting the face of disgust or of sympathy peer out from behind the mask of cleverness; there's no depth or mordancy to the irony; it's just the repeated use of pretty tunes to describe terrible things.  Bernstein is at his best when he can cut loose, but open-hearted emotionality doesn't fit into this story very well until the end when he can pull out all the stops with "Make Our Garden Grow."  The most authentically Voltairian element about "Candide" is the work of the least-heralded of the major contributors to the show, the lyricist Richard Wilbur: These must be the wittiest, best-versified Broadway lyrics between Lorenz Hart's Pal Joey and the best of Sondheim.  And Wilbur is mordant.

The Lyric plays Candide in a pretty, expensive-looking physical production by Emanuele Luzzati (sets) and Robin VerHage (costumes) devised for the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis; presumably Timothy Ocel's stage production is modeled on Colin Graham's original.  From the prancing and pointless harlequinade that invades the overture, it is relentlessly busy and almost entirely decorative — the two syphilis songs have a terrible new resonance in the age of AIDS, for example, but we get that from the words and not from the music or the staging.  The worst thing about the direction, however, was the handling of the spoken dialogue: The performers put too much energy into incomprehensible, phony and selectively offensive accents.  When the characters are at home in Germany, they speak perfectly clear English; in other scenes slovenly Slavic and Hispanic accents are supposed to delight us.  What message does this send?

Stewart Robertson's conducting lacked energy, precision and fizz; some of it was almost narcoleptic.  But the Lyric did assemble a wonderful cast.  Best of all was baritone David Evitts as the Voltaire figure: He understands the piece, sings the music splendidly, acts with free yet tightly focused imagination and gets every word across.  Richard Clement as Candide managed to make simple goodness and naivete utterly convincing, and he is a singer of real vocal sophistication.  Lisa Saffer has an alert, amusing and volatile face (atrociously lit by lighting designer Christopher Akerlind during her big number), and she makes high notes and coloratura sound as fun as taking a bubblebath.  Jan Curtis all but vanished from the operatic stage after her knockout performance in the telecast premiere of Carlisle Floyd's Willie Stark back in 1981, so it was a treat to welcome her back for a spicy performance as the Old Lady.  Her voice is still strong, healthy and blooming, so one wishes she hadn't worked so hard to sound like an old wreck; the original Old Lady, Irra Petina, didn't have any other choice.  All of the others — especially Mark Evans and Samuel Mungo — were entirely capable, but even all these talented people couldn't compensate for what the creators couldn't put into Candide.

Innocents abroad have become a hot commodity lately; witness the popularity of Forrest Gump, a movie that follows a naive young man across 30 years of American history.  Another such young man, who predates Forrest by at least two centuries, was named Candide, and he was the product of French philosopher and writer Voltaire's imagination. 

In the 1950s, Candide's escapades were put to music by composer Leonard Bernstein.  In fantastical scenes, the hero Candide crosses mountains and seas, escapes wars and inquisitions in search of that "Best of All Possible Worlds."  The Boston Lyric Opera is currently staging the comic operetta, named after its quintessential innocent, Candide.  The production marks a step forward for the opera company, as well as a welcome reminder of Bernstein's musical genius. 

In the composer's notes, excerpted in the program, Bernstein explains that with Candide Voltaire was satirizing a philosophy prevalent in his time, which held: "Everything that is, is right."  Voltaire was dismayed that this philosophy promoted a deep fatalism, which robbed individuals of initiative: If everything that happened was exactly as it was meant to be, why bother?  Voltaire used his story to lash out at established authority, blaming royalty, merchants, and the military, but most of all, religious leaders for perpetuating this complacency. 

The lad Candide possesses a charmingly simple faith, but he comes to relinquish naivete in favor of practical, unadorned wisdom: After his hardships, Candide concludes that the search for Eldorado — where all his dreams will come true — is useless.  He chooses instead to work with what he and his love, Cunegonde, already have in "We'll build our house, and chop our wood, and make our garden grow." 

The Boston Lyric Opera's presentation is delightful.  The principle singers have both fine voices and acting talent, with Richard Clement (as Candide) and Lisa Saffer (Cunegonde) standing out.  Clement's gentle tenor on the song "It Must Be So" trailed off tenderly, and Saffer's spritely "Glitter and Be Gay" was an audience favorite.  The chorus brought energy and a solid supporting sound to the production. 

* Candide has two more performances, March 17 and 19, at the Emerson Majestic Theatre.

Douglas C. Wager's production of Candide at Arena Stage is sumptuous, beautifully sung, splendidly designed and full of his hallmark visual wit.  Returning to the show he directed so triumphantly in 1983, Wager has teamed with designer Zack Brown, who has provided him with a set filled with circles: the two concentric circles that make up the playing area, the celestial globe that floats over one entrance, the gyroscope that dominates the set from above.  Following the Voltaire story that forms the basis of the Leonard Bernstein musical, Wager throws the hapless characters into the maelstrom of life, which whirls them down from their idealistic heights to earthy reality.

Candide (Paul Binotto) is foster brother to the young nobles Maximillian (Merwin Foard) and Cunegonde (Rebecca Baxter).  All three, along with the maid Paquette (Karyn Quackenbush), are instructed about life by Dr. Pangloss (Richard Bauer), who leads them in singing "The Best of All Possible Worlds." Naturally, things go downhill from there.  There are wars, pirates, brigands, swindlers, rapists, actors (!) and assorted catastrophes.  As the action bounces from country to country, the ravished Cunegonde bounces from brothel to brothel and Candide from one unlucky adventure to another.  By show's end, everyone has decided that perhaps the best wisdom is just to plant a nice garden.

The production is full of playful moments.  Before singing her song of hedonistic acceptance, "Glitter and Be Gay," Cunegonde is revealed to us in a bath full of plastic soap bubbles; a lover hands her a gift: a golden rubber duck.  At one point a miniature boat sails around the edges of the Fichandler Theater behind the audience.  During "Auto-Da-Fe" — with its famous opening line, "What a day, what a day, for an auto-da-fe," — an Inquisition victim burns to bones in a sleight-of-hand instant.

Most charmingly, when our unfortunate travelers land on a peaceful island inhabited entirely by sheep, members of the ensemble poke their heads and arms out of trapdoors to manipulate little sheep hand puppets.  Though Jessica Frankel and Dorothy Yanes sing "Sheep's Song" very prettily, it's hard to keep your eyes off the antics the actors give their tiny sheep: Some put their heads together and sing, some dance a little, some just sway in time.  This kind of childlike whimsy, which curdles in lesser hands, is sweet cream in Wager's.

Still, for all its strengths, this is not Wager at his musical comedy best.  Of course, his best is about as good as you can get, so that's not much of a cavil.  But in shows such as his Marx Brothers musicals, or his original production of Candide, Wager left you giddy with pleasure, as if your head had blissfully filled with exploding champagne bubbles.  Here he's inventive without being inspired, and there are places where the evening's spin slows and wobbles.

Some of this is the fault of the material itself.  In 1973, when Hal Prince put this version of the show together from an original with a Lillian Hellman book, the country was still busy trying to find an honest replacement for the sentimental aesthetic of the '50s, and Candide's cynical heartlessness was bracing.  Now, however, as the century glumly ends, Candide seems cold and smug.  In his 18th-century novella, Voltaire, spokesman for the Age of Reason, was lashing out at both the complacent aristocracy and what he viewed as a superstition-ridden Catholic Church.  All Bernstein and company are doing is skewering the bourgeoisie — a familiar puncturing by this time — and unlike Voltaire, they have nothing to offer in place of what they cut down.  Voltaire believed in the possibilities of the human mind; the creators of the musical appear to have believed in how smart they were.

This slight chilliness extends to the music.  Candide surely has one of the greatest scores of any American musical, but this is not exactly the same thing as having great songs.  "Glitter and Be Gay" and "Make Our Garden Grow" are exquisite art objects for us to admire.  Stephen Sondheim's melodically difficult songs have personal force; they connect with an audience.  But the songs of Candide preen before us — extraordinarily beautiful, but also vain and self-satisfied.

In some ways the ingenious set design and staging also contribute to the show's lack of warmth.  Essentially, the actors must be in the inner circle, in the outer circle or passing between them.  It's easy for the production to turn in on itself, away from us, and become a little remote.

Dressed in ludicrous and gorgeous costumes by Brown and lit almost lovingly by Allen Lee Hughes, the performers sing the tricky songs fabulously.  Binotto has one of those fallen-from-Heaven tenors, so full and sweet it's almost unearthly, and Baxter's rich soprano is up to the obstacle course of Cunegonde's acrobatic vocalizing.  There's a lot of strong comic acting in this production too, from the masterly Bauer as Voltaire/Pangloss to the delicately loony Foard as Maximillian (he has a drag number that calls up ecstatic memories of Jack Lemmon) to Terrence Currier's various eccentric characters to Frankel's nasty baroness to Dana Krueger's bawdy Old Lady.  (Her "I Am Easily Assimilated" is the best production number in the show.)

Even at his second-best, Wager is better than most directors at their finest.  This is an impressive and satisfying production.  But it remains opaque and somewhat impersonal.  Wager must have had compelling reasons to return to this material a second time, but he doesn't give the audience any hint of what they might have been.

Candide, music by Leonard Bernstein; book adapted from Voltaire by Hugh Wheeler; lyrics by Richard Wilbur; additional lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and John Latouche.  Conductor and musical director, George Fulginiti-Shakar; choreography, Darryl V. Jones; sound, Timothy Thompson.  With John Easterlin, Michael W. Howell, David Marks, Wendell Wright, David St. Louis.  At Arena Stage through May 26.

Leonard Bernstein loved the theater — but it's unclear whether the feeling was mutual.  Even an unquestioned masterpiece such as West Side Story endured a painful birth and (initially) indifferent critical reaction.  Candide, on the other hand, was not met with apathy when it was introduced in 1956.  In the words of former Bernstein protege Marin Alsop, it was "a total flop."  The reason was simple, she said: "He was Leonard Bernstein.  Everyone knew who he was.  He was a famous, serious composer.  He wasn't allowed (by critics and audiences) to simply write an operetta.  Sometimes I wonder if he had used a pseudonym, if his work would have been better received."

The conductor is in residence at Central City Opera for much of this summer — but she won't be conducting Candide, opening the season in the Opera House.  Instead, she's preparing to lead Verdi's La Traviata.  But she is keenly interested in the staging of Bernstein's musical romp through Voltaire's satirical novel.  After years of serious reworking, Candide finally found its way into the hearts of critics and theatergoers.  It took time for Bernstein's followers to catch up with the pops flavor of the score, Alsop noted.  "It was his own fault," she said.  "He put himself in a unique position (by embracing) the cross-over genre.  When he turned away from serious music, he was accused of being too popular.  And when he wrote serious music, he was accused of being too cerebral. 

"Lenny became a target.  But now we can see that this was the beginning of serious composers moving into cross-over.  He became a major influence on so many people, particularly Stephen Sondheim (his collaborator in West Side Story)."  In the '80s, Alsop studied with and befriended Bernstein during a conducting program at the Tanglewood Music Festival.  She said he never spoke out about the sting of constant criticism — though she knows it must have been painful.  Now, a decade after his death, Bernstein's music is being embraced more consistently.  "Sometimes it takes people dying to get attention," the conductor said.  Not that Bernstein was so ahead of his time.  "Audiences simply didn't grasp his world view," she said.  "He was passionate about everything.  Every day he was trying to change the world, and so every piece (of music) had the same intent.  He wasn't satisfied with exploring one aspect of a composition.  He had to make a global statement. 

"Same thing in conversation.  Once he got rolling, you couldn't get a word in.  You should have heard him go on about Israel." Thus, Candide could not serve merely as a charming globe-trotting comic tale of adventure and misadventure — in Bernstein's hands it became an indictment of corrupt nations, of arrogance and greed, of smug contentment.  And in its final moments, the work soars as a salute to the eternal power of love.  "It's a wonderful blend of high art and base humor," Alsop said.  In other words, pure Lenny. 

Any theater troupe crazy enough to stage Leonard Bernstein's Candide should do two things before commencing: Take several deep breaths, and then decide just what the darned thing is.  The cast of Central City Opera's season-opening production has clearly followed both suggestions.  Through all the constant onstage and (one assumes from the endless costume changes) offstage running around, no one appeared winded.  Best of all, the singers and director Dorothy Danner seemed to have a firm grip on the elusive meaning of Candide.  Saturday night's smartly dressed audience was treated to an intelligent mix of bawdy comedy, biting satire and just enough romance to keep things real. 

If Bernstein can be accused of trying too hard, the cast and crew pulled it off with apparent ease.  Candide may be many things, but it should never turn into a manic track meet.  The charming sets and costumes, borrowed from Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, worked wonderfully on the cramped Opera House stage (loved those giant chairs) — crisply following the zany, impossible scene shifts from Germany to Colombia to Eldorado to a zillion other ports-of-call.  Meanwhile, the director kept the busy cast moving along with the story's absurd twists, wisely shortening the Eldorado and desert island scenes.  Danner's commedia dell'arte mime segment enacted over the popular Overture didn't quite hold up, but the concept created the right mood.  Once the show began, any temptation toward heavy slapstick was blessedly held in check, though there were sight gags a-plenty. 

Among the ensemble numbers, the "Auto-da-fe" was over-populated, but "What's the Use" was a delight.  Amazingly enough, the characters' humanity never slipped from view — which is crucial, if we're going to care about the nonstop crises that befall everyone on board.  For that, credit must be given to the consistent, committed cast of comic crazies.  Gene Scheer, fake nose and all, was refreshingly restrained in the dual role of Voltaire and Pangloss.  Comic honors among the women easily went to Myrna Paris as the hilariously unfortunate Old Woman.  Her "I Am Easily Assimilated" was one of several highpoints.  Other character roles were treated nimbly by Katherine Rohrer (Paquette), Jeff Morrissey (Maximilian), David Gordon (Governor) and Ryan Kinsella (various nasty chaps). 

In the midst of all this goofiness stood our handsome, love-struck, continually tested lovers: William Burden's Candide and Margaret Lloyd's Cunegonde.  In their Central City debuts, both proved marvelous discoveries.  The lovely Lloyd mixed superb coloratura singing and impeccable comic timing in her showpiece, "Glitter and Be Gay", hitting (almost) all the notes and skillfully slipping from laughter to tears.  Burden is a real find: a studly tenor with a clear, unforced voice and a relaxed, likable charm.  The plaintive "It Must Be So" has rarely sounded so effective.  Don't let him get away!  Let's not forget the athletic chorus, who crowded onto the stage and into the house, singing and acting with flair through the 10,000 costume and set changes.  Nice ensemble work in the touching finale.  In the pit, Hal France maintained a crisp pace, leading a solid orchestra with the right touch of frivolous fun.  This is a show that requires frivolity   it's the only way to get past the exhausting score and supercute libretto. 

The action of Bernstein's Candide travels nonchalantly around the globe, without benefit of visas or logic.  From Westphalia to the New World and back to the Old, the main characters repeatedly escape horrible fates, only to wind up together as happy horticulturists.  In Central City Opera's season-opening production of the 1982 Hal Prince-New York City Opera version, seen July 1 in the Colorado mountain town's venerable Opera House, director Dorothy Danner managed to make sense of the unending scene shifts while keeping her handsome cast under control.  Wisely making some serious cuts in this manic operetta (exotic Eldorado proved an afterthought), the director set a brisk pace that never looked breathless.  Resisting the temptation to send this tale over the top, Danner nimbly kept a human touch, and it paid off.

The lovely central couple of William Burden (Candide) and Margaret Lloyd (Cunegonde) traversed the action with sincere smiles and unexpected depth.  Not only did they look great and act with conviction, but their clear, unforced singing caused many in the audience to wonder where they have been hiding.  Though Lloyd was charming, particularly in her showpiece "Glitter and Be Gay," Burden emerged the biggest crowd-pleaser, floating notes with ease in "It Must Be So," moving with fluidity and emoting without mugging.

The supporting cast, led by Gene Scheer, who underplayed the often overplayed Pangloss (even with a silly metallic nose) while doubling effectively as Voltaire, likewise held the silliness in abeyance.  Though a comic wiz, Scheer was no match for Myrna Paris's antics as the half-assed Old Lady.  Her acting, like her accent, was kept in check, and "I Am Easily Assimilated" stopped the show.  Jeff Morrissey (Maximilian), Katherine Rohrer (Paquette) and David Gordon (Governor) contributed amusing comic performances.

Everyone seemed at home amid the fanciful sets (from Opera Theatre of Saint Louis), only now and then overcrowding the tiny stage.  The chorus performed with conviction and kept its cool, despite frequent costume changes.  In the pit, Hal France took a leisurely pace for the frenetic overture (overshadowed by some stilted commedia dell'arte miming, as Voltaire penned his book) and remained in sync with the absurdities onstage. Bernstein can be accused of trying too hard in Candide, yet the Central City cast made it look easy.

Closer to operetta than opera, American 20th-century composer Leonard Bernstein's Candide opens Saturday at the Keller Auditorium for a run of four Portland Opera shows.  A combination of Bernstein's moving music and Voltaire's 18th-century wit, the operetta will prompt you "to laugh, cry and end up with a lump in your throat," said baritone Robert Orth between rehearsals last week.  "Otherwise, you should be medically tested."  A comic musical-theater actor in addition to an accomplished opera singer, Orth will sing the roles of Voltaire and Pangloss, Voltaire' s pivotal and naive professor who believes in "the best of all possible worlds."  Orth has sung the opera and the same roles two previous times, and considers Candide a work of deep but light-hearted genius.  "It's so American Bernstein's touches of pop and jazz, blended with his symphonic sensibilities.  Bernstein does it all with such finesse.  He had so much life, so much energy."

Though the entire cast doesn't agree that Bernstein's music works well for the voice "You go higher and then higher and then higher," says Orth.  The music, written in 1956, culminates in the heartfelt and well-known "Make Our Garden Grow."  Tenor Richard Troxell, making his debut in Portland, sings the role of Candide, the hapless lad who embarks on an epic and bumbling journey, learning that blind optimism does indeed block a balanced view of the real world.  Candide encounters war, the Spanish Inquisition, streets paved with gold, lecherous and wise people, hypocrisy and treachery.  Though an intellectual product of the Enlightenment, Voltaire remains a master satirist.  His wit still has teeth three centuries later. 

The three-act, three-hour opera is directed by Christopher Mattaliano, who has directed Portland Opera productions four times in the last 10 years.  Cast members credit the Yale and Juilliard teacher with keeping the operetta from falling into comic bits and pieces.  "Chris wants to tell the story clearly," said baritone William Theisen, who will perform the roles of eight characters.  "Candide's moments of profundity," Theisen adds, make the opera as meaningful as it is goofy.  A musical theater performer who sang in Portland Opera's 2001 La Belle Helene, Jacques Offenbach's spoof, with Orth, Theisen said, "z,i.Candide is not linear, but if you want to be led along, you will be." Children and teens likely will get as much or more fun from Candide than adults will, said Orth, because "it's pretend, it's story theater, and it makes you use your imagination."

Candide is being produced with the Austin Lyric Opera, and features an abstract set of vivid slide projections to propel Candide around the world.  The flick-of-a-switch lighting design proves more efficient than "rolling out entire cities," Orth said.  Margaret Lloyd, a soprano singing the role of Candide's love interest, Cunegonde, will be making her Portland debut, as will music conductor Michael Barrett, Bernstein's assistant conductor from 1985 to 1990.  The opera will be sung in English, with "supra titles" suspended from the stage. 

Light played tricks on the eyes in Candide, Portland Opera's season finale (seen May 11).  On a bare stage, Jerome Sirlin's lighted projections flung audiences from a Bulgarian battlefield to a stomach-churning ship at sea, and from the splendor of a Renaissance cathedral to a bawdy Venetian gambling casino.  Candide was Leonard Bernstein's parody of parodies, and Sirlin's sets brought to life each of the work's extravagant locations.  Directed with a nimble touch by Christopher Mattaliano, the production skipped around the best of all possible worlds with a strong cast and agile orchestra.

Both of Portland Opera's spring productions originally opened on Broadway in the 1950s.  Gian Carlo Menotti's The Consul triumphed in 1950, while Candide bombed six years later.  The age of McCarthyism cried out for caricature, and Lillian Hellman, who admired "the dash, the speed, the roaring-river quality" of Voltaire's attacks on the Age of Enlightenment, seemed an appropriate partner.  But her words — and those of Dorothy Parker, Richard Wilbur and Stephen Sondheim — labor against the stream of tunes that Bernstein unleashed.  Candide is the rare Broadway score in which Bernstein did not use jazz, but he employed just about everything else: tangos, spoofs of eighteenth-century ensembles, grand-opera choruses and a bravura "jewel" song for the soprano, "Glitter and Be Gay."  Candide begins with the greatest overture of the twentieth century, and the orchestra dashed it off winningly.  Conductor Michael Barrett caught the giddiness without sacrificing detail.

Robert Orth set the tone of the evening with a wickedly pompous Dr. Pangloss, the philosopher who argues that because this is the only world, it follows that this is the best of all possible worlds.  He was the best of all possible mimics, too, donning accents and props with lightning speed.  For a final trick, he brought a splendid growl to Martin's guttural aria.  As Cunegonde, Margaret Lloyd slipped easily between the roles of saucy mistress and innocent ingenue.  The vocal mania of "Glitter and Be Gay" was just about perfect, with Lloyd flinging ropes of pearls around her neck as she scaled the stratosphere.  "If I'm not pure, at least my jewels are," she warbled.  Whether in pouty anger or zealous love, her voice remained focused and full-volume.

Candide, that "happy little illegitimate fellow," is the straight man of the show, a pivot around which the foible-filled characters cavort.  Richard Troxell brought seriousness yet fresh-sounding sincerity to the part.  He filled his lament on the "death" of Cunegonde with ardent tone, beautifully produced.  Catherine Cook, as the Old Lady, clucked and scolded the young couple with playful vigor.  Anyone's problems would pale beside those of a woman with one buttock.  Other vocal standouts were Don Davis as Maximillian, Christine Meadows as the Baroness et al., Marie Bafus as Paquette and William Theisen as the Baron, Archbishop, Wise Man and Ragotski.  Under Mark Trawka's direction, chorus members sang handsomely.

The latest edition of Leonard Bernstein's Candide does not solve all the problems that have shadowed this work since 1956, but the Boston Conservatory Theater's production is a triumph for the performers — and for the enduring vitality of Bernstein's music and the team of lyricists headed by Richard Wilbur.

This production represents the American premiere of the Royal National Theatre version, first performed in London in 1999.  John Caird's new book retains the narrator of previous versions, who becomes the author of Candide, Voltaire himself.  He basically recites his 1759 book, while the actors take over much of his original dialogue, bursting into song at regular intervals.  This is not un-theatrical, but it is undramatic — playwright Lillian Hellman, author of the original Broadway book, wrote of the "dash, the speed, the roaring river" unstoppability of Voltaire's text; as recited, it seems becalmed.  After an interminable second act that has added nothing to the first but a couple of good numbers, the show feels at least 45 minutes too long.  This version does have the virtue of sharpening the satirical edge that previous versions had dulled, and it contains most of the music Bernstein wrote for Candide, and mostly in the order he wanted it.

Played on a pretty unit set by Peter Waldron and enlivened by extravagantly red costumes by Stacey Stephens, Neil Donohoe's brilliant staging freshens up an old theatrical conceit — Candide is presented by a slightly seedy traveling circus with acrobats, trapeze artists, jugglers, and chorus girls; any time things threaten to slow down, Donohoe can send in the clowns.  The contemporary props — boxes of corn flakes, a child's little red wagon, twirlers' batons, a stuffed panda — entertainingly remind us that this old story is still contemporary.  The staging is fluent, busy (there are 35 players on the small stage), colorful, consistently inventive, with a lively streak of undergraduate humor.  There is an excellent reduced orchestra, shamefully unnamed and unlisted in the program book, led by the expert and idiomatic conductor Reuben M. Reynolds III.  If only local professional opera could reach this musical and dramatic standard more often.

The high-energy cast offers exceptional performances in the smallest roles, and star turns from the principals, who are also good ensemble players.  Outstanding among them were Josh Grisetti in the difficult, talky double role of Voltaire and Pangloss; Billy Piscopo as a Maximilian roaring out of the closet; and especially Alysha Umphress, dazzling in accent, tone, and timing as the one-buttocked Old Woman.  Kalynn Dodge brings down the house with the most difficult song "Glitter and Be Gay," and she's an irresistible ingenue, but it's irresponsible to ask a 20-ish performer whose vocal technique is not yet set to perform this part six times in five days.  Austin Lesch is an almost ideal Candide, earnest and touching in appearance, song, and characterization as he learns the hard way how to create the best of all possible worlds by cultivating his own garden.

With Opera Pacific's clumsy new production of Candide, unveiled Tuesday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, let the debate begin again.  Just about everyone agrees that this score contains Leonard Bernstein's most inspired theater music, but hardly anyone agrees about anything else.  Is it musical comedy or opera?  Is it silly satire or something a lot more serious?  Can we, should we, dare we stage it?  Can't we just live happily ever after with its great numbers?  Numbers, you say?  Arias, say I!

Bernstein thought he could settle the controversy right from the start.  When the show opened on Broadway in 1956, he wrote a piece for the New York Times that took the form of an interview between the composer and his id.  "My dear Id," he concluded, hoping to put the issue to rest, "who ever said it wasn't an operetta?"

Broadway audiences readily accepted the argument that it wasn't a musical, and the show closed after two months.  The blame was laid on Lillian Hellman's book and on the sheer impossibility of transferring the absurdities of Voltaire's satire to the stage.  Over the years, impressive writers and directors worked on and reworked Candide until it moved gradually — though not completely — from Broadway to the opera house.

In fact, Candide is music theater (exactly what kind no longer matters) waiting for the right director and musical team.  As Bernstein showed when he finally conducted it for the first time, in a 1989 concert performance in London a year before his death, the piece, for all its fabulous wit and sparkling melody, is one of serious political thought and near religious transcendence.

The basic premise is that if you believe that this is the best of all possible worlds, you are a dangerous idiot — the inspiration for the show was that Hellman and Bernstein believed Sen. Joseph McCarthy to be the biggest and most dangerous idiot of all and that this is what his witch hunt for communists really signified.  But something important happens as Voltaire's hapless hero, his absurdly optimistic tutor, Dr. Pangloss, and the ingenue Cunegonde cheerfully undergo one over-the-top torture after another.  They suddenly see there is more to life than riches and political power.

Their conversion to a simple life is one of the great spiritual transformations in modern theater, but making it convincing has thrown more than one experienced director.  Opera Pacific turned to a young one, Jeffrey Lentz, with the hope, perhaps, of something fresh.  What it got, instead, was 2 1/2 hours' worth of cheap burlesque followed by 15 minutes of deep emotion, when all the trappings of farce simply drop away.

Actually, it is hard to gauge just what Opera Pacific is up to with this Candide.  It has gone to some trouble, but not enough.  For sets, it uses projections created by Jerome Sirlin that cleverly produce a cinematic ambience, allowing this footloose show to easily move around the globe.  But such projections, which were all the rage 15 years ago, look dated by comparison with the latest virtual-reality multimedia techniques.  They looked particularly bad Tuesday when the spots kept missing the actors.

The company also went to the trouble of hiring a rising star, the exciting young coloratura Laura Claycomb, as Cunegonde.  (Lynette Tapia will sing the role Sunday.)  Claycomb sang the signature "Glitter and Be Gay" with hilarious ease, and her transformation from sexy silly goose to woman of depth at the end was wonderful.  But no one else in the cast was on her level.  And so powerful was she at the end that you realized how wasted she was earlier when offered little more than sitcom-level horseplay.

John DeMain conducted efficiently, and he overcame the orchestra's initial sloppiness, rising to the big moments.  But nothing sounded quite right.  Amplification was used for spoken dialogue and at least some of the singing.  It never helped the singers.  Often, when a musical number started, the voices seemed to fade away.  Had the show been fabulous, that alone would have spoiled it.

Consequently, it was hard for the cast, other than the extraordinary Claycomb, to make a strong impact.  Richard Troxell was nonetheless a dashing Candide and a deep one in his final aria, "Nothing More Than This."  Frank Hernandez, the twit Maximillian, is a funny actor, and so is Judith Christin, the Old Lady.  Given the best of all possible sound systems, William Parcher might have made an effective Dr. Pangloss.