You can't blame conductors and stage directors for feeling flummoxed when putting together a production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide.  From its original 1956 incarnation through the multiple revisions of the score in which Bernstein took part, the composer and his collaborators were never sure they had the right mix of zany satire and touching sentiment for this tale, taken from Voltaire, of a strapping Westphalian youth who gullibly believes the philosophy of his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, that everything that happens must be for the best.

The director Lonny Price has assembled a hybrid version for the inventive semi-staged production that the New York Philharmonic presented at Avery Fisher Hall on Wednesday night, with two remaining performances tonight and tomorrow.  It's a vibrant and often delightful show, except for the frequent, annoying and tasteless lapses into dumb topical jokes and sight gags that Mr. Price inserted into his adaptation of Hugh Wheeler's book.  When, in just one of the disasters the exiled Candide encounters on his travels, he is condemned to death, the judge is portrayed as Donald Trump in a wavy wig, who is reading his own autobiography as he tells the young man, ''You're fired!''

The lapses were all the more unfortunate because much of the production was beguiling, starting with the fine conducting of Marin Alsop.  Bernstein's score is itself a hybrid of wistfully lyrical songs, impish caricatures of opera and skillfully rendered pastiches of everything from Renaissance sacred music to slinky tangos.  But many conductors, nervous about the stylistic mixings, can't help overselling the music by milking the tender melodies and pumping up the dances and patter songs.

Bernstein was an important mentor to Ms. Alsop, and she remains one of his most sensitive interpreters.  From the start of the sprightly overture, she kept the pace lithe but reined in enough to allow the notes to speak.  She had clearly worked with the splendid cast to find tempos that would allow them to enunciate the lyrics.  She proved that the way to make the charm and richness of this score come through is to respect the music.  The Philharmonic responded with stylish and beautifully relaxed playing.

The cast was topped by the irrepressible Kristin Chenoweth as Cunegonde, the bastard Candide's aristocratic half-cousin and the young woman he adores.  Ms. Chenoweth ably handled the stratospheric coloratura roulades of the show-stopping and vocally daunting ''Glitter and Be Gay,'' all the while acting the scene dynamically and shifting moods by the measure, one moment the teary-eyed innocent forced into sexual degradation, the next a savvy operator who finds compensation aplenty in her ruby rings and golden gowns.

She capped her triumphant final note with her arms thrust high, à la Evita, a witty nod to the presence in the cast of the formidable Patti LuPone.  Ms. LuPone has the role of the Old Lady, who during several rambling narratives in myriad exotic accents relating her life of romance and tragedy never does explain why she has only one buttock.

Opera singers can often seem like classical-music stiffs when working alongside musical-theater pros.  But the tenor Paul Groves more than held his own as an endearingly good-hearted and befuddled Candide.  He gets the award for best diction of the night; he sang as if speaking to you.

Still, his performance was undermined by Mr. Price's inserted gags.  When Candide is banished from Westphalia, just as Mr. Groves was singing Bernstein's poignant meditation ''It Must Be So'' with heartbreaking sweetness, Mr. Price had Candide pack a copy of the LP recording of ''West Side Story'' into his suitcase.  Naturally, the audience burst into hearty laughter.

Thomas Allen, the distinguished British baritone, was an inspired choice for the multiple roles of Dr. Pangloss, the Narrator and Voltaire.  Still, the elegant Sir Thomas seemed visibly uncomfortable now and then when he had to utter some lame topical joke, as when the Narrator explains that the Inquisition was unrivaled for its combination of the sacred and profane until the onset of the United States Senate.  Huh?

Janine LaManna as Paquette, the maid, and Jeff Blumenkrantz as Maximillian, Cunegonde's vain brother, were the other two members of the youthful quartet who learn that there is no such thing as a best of all possible worlds.  The choral finale, ''Make Our Garden Grow,'' which begins with Candide's vow to build a simple, decent life for himself and his beloved, was sung with resplendent sound by the Westminster Symphonic Choir.  I wish they had repeated it, if only to banish memories of all the pointless jokes.

Leonard Bernstein's Candide is a legendary problem child.  The 1956 Broadway premiere tanked after 73 performances, mostly because of Lillian Hellman's dour, vinegary book, which leached the Gallic charm out of Voltaire's sardonic fable on the dangers of blind optimism.  Harold Prince's 1974 revival, with an all-new book by Hugh Wheeler, was a hit, but Mr. Prince gutted the score in order to speed up the show.  Since then, most productions of Candide have taken place in opera houses, usually emphasizing the myriad beauties of Bernstein's music at the expense of theatrical pizzazz.  Hence I was overjoyed to learn that the New York Philharmonic was presenting a semistaged concert version directed by Lonny Price (Master Harold . . . and the boys) and featuring a mixed cast of Broadway stars and opera singers.  Might this perhaps be the perfectly gauged compromise that hitherto had eluded Candide buffs?  Not quite — but almost.

Kristin Chenoweth, who took a week off from Wicked to appear in Candide, was the best of all possible Cunegondes, not excluding Barbara Cook, who created the role.  Cunegonde, Candide's shopworn sweetheart, is far beyond the reach of ordinary musical-comedy singers, for "Glitter and Be Gay," her big number, is an all-stops-out coloratura aria requiring a rock-solid high E flat.  I knew the diminutive Ms. Chenoweth had operatic training, but it never occurred to me that her high notes would have survived years of Broadway belting, much less that she could still nail them with the brilliance and panache of a full-time opera star.  Add to that her impish charm and switchblade-sharp timing and . . . well, let's just say I'm no longer capable of being surprised by the amazing Ms. Chenoweth.  After "Glitter and Be Gay," I wouldn't have boggled if she'd picked up the baton and conducted the second act.

Fortunately, she didn't need to, since Marin Alsop led the Philharmonic in a bustling performance whose tempos were right on the nose (unlike the ones in Bernstein's 1989 recording, which are coma-inducingly slooow).  Nor did Ms. Chenoweth take sole honors in the singing department: Paul Groves's Candide was heartfelt and handsome-sounding, while Sir Thomas Allen's Pangloss couldn't have been bettered.  Vocally speaking, Patti LuPone doesn't bat in that exalted league, but no other apologies need be made for her zesty performance as the Old Lady, and she tore up the joint with "I Am Easily Assimilated."

Mr. Price, who also directed the Philharmonic's memorable concert version of Sweeney Todd in 2000, committed a few blunders this time around, sticking in campy jokes where they didn't belong (Wheeler's book is quite campy enough, thank you very much) and occasionally forgetting that the 2,742-seat Avery Fisher Hall, unlike a medium-size Broadway theater, is too deep for small-scale details to be visible beyond the first couple of dozen rows.  That said, his slapsticky staging made clever use of the shallow playing space in front of the orchestra, and it was a stroke of directorial genius to seat the Westminster Symphonic Choir in bleachers and have its members hold up football-style flash cards en masse throughout the evening (I especially liked the ones that spelled out "INTRODUCING MISS PATTI LUPONE!").

Except for the dumb jokes, this Candide went like a shot, and I've never heard a better-sung, better-played performance, on or off record.  The catch — and it's a huge one — is that it ran for only four performances.  If you didn't see it, you're out of luck.  On the other hand, a close facsimile of Mr. Price's staging could easily be produced in a Broadway theater, with inevitable losses (the orchestra would need to be cut in half) and compensating gains (Richard Wilbur's devilishly witty lyrics would come across more easily).  Such a revival might go a long way toward establishing Candide as an operetta that is both musically masterly and theatrically viable — as well as giving Kristin Chenoweth a starring role worthy of her prodigious gifts.  Wicked is fun, and she's terrific in it, but if she were to play Cunegonde on Broadway, I'd go see her twice a week and hang out at the stage door in between shows.

What to do with Candide?  Nearly 50 years after Leonard Bernstein’s unclassifiable opera-operetta-musical first puzzled Broadway audiences, this extravaganza has been looking for its proper home.  A major part of the search has involved trying to hit upon a practical performing edition for a work that seems to turn up in a different version whenever it gets revived.  I saw the Ur-Candide as a college student when it came to Boston for previews in 1956, a seemingly endless but dazzling mess.  Apparently, every scrap of available material was tested onstage during those initial tryouts—on the night I saw it, the curtain didn’t come down until nearly 1 a.m.  (As the show’s director, Tyrone Guthrie, once mused, “Rossini and Cole Porter seemed to have been rearranging Götterdämmerung.”)  Since then, many hands have retooled the book, lyrics, and score, until Bernstein passed a benediction on the “final revised version” in 1989, a year before he died.

Candide’s latest reincarnation has been at the New York Philharmonic, which recently put on an elaborate semi-staged production that took note of the composer’s last words on the subject but hardly followed them very closely.  Director Lonny Price cobbled together yet another version from various past editions, but without making any significant improvements and doing some harm along the way.  Much music was cut from Act Two, which only makes it seem more sporadic and disheveled than ever.  Worse, this latest adaptation of Hugh Wheeler’s rewritten book completely reduces the characters to cartoon clichés and robs the piece of its most treasurable quality: a genuine feeling for troubled humanity, even amid all the hilarity and craziness.

I feared as much after reading in the program that Price’s all-time favorite Candide production was Hal Prince’s egregious 1973 one-act version, with its stripped-down score, crude humor, and airy disregard of the work’s musical and vocal values.  Price compounds this by adding a lot of cheap jokes, witless sight gags, and dumb topical references, never more irritatingly intrusive than when the piece is trying to strike a note of wistful poignancy.  Candide is portrayed as the ultimate doofus without any redeeming points to make us care about him.  With almost nothing left to sing, Dr. Pangloss hardly exists at all except as a faceless and not very amusing narrator.  Cunegonde becomes a loud, squealing, supremely irritating super-slut, while Maximillian minces about like the Queen of the May, if anyone still finds that sort of tiresome gay caricature a laugh riot.

Weaving enthusiastically in, around, and about the Philharmonic musicians, the elaborately costumed soloists worked hard and on occasion even managed to rise above it all.  If only he had been given the opportunity to show himself to better advantage, Paul Groves could be the best of all possible Candides with his sweetly unblemished operatic tenor, clear diction, and appealing stage presence.  No doubt Kristin Chenoweth as Cunegonde has her admirers, but her overmiked, terminally chirpy coloratura soprano mostly put me in mind of a factory whistle, while Sir Thomas Allen was totally wasted as Pangloss.  Patti LuPone suffered least as the Old Lady, setting just the right tone of mordant humor for this eternal survivor.  Marin Alsop conducted the Philharmonic energetically, but under such adverse conditions, it was impossible to savor the wit, charm, intoxicating cross-rhythms, and ingenious pastiches of this endlessly inventive score.

I’m more than content with Bernstein’s last thoughts on Candide, but one day, if and when Lillian Hellman’s original book is made available once again, it might be useful to go back to the beginning and see whether anything can yet be done to get it right.  Perhaps not, but this Candide fan still remembers how he emerged from that first marathon performance long ago, very tired but also very happy.

Candide has never quite gotten its due.  When it opened in 1956, this Broadway musical adaptation of Voltaire's classic tale about catastrophe and contentment was more respected than beloved.  Leonard Bernstein's neoclassical pastiche score and Richard Wilbur's bejeweled lyrics won admiring reviews.  But Lillian Hellman's book took a beating, and audiences apparently weren't ready for an ironic picaresque that anticipated Sondheim more than it satisfied contemporary tastes.

A 1974 revival, with a book revised by Hugh Wheeler, retooled lyrics and a sprawling spider-web set, had a good run, and the show has turned up in opera houses, regional theaters and again on Broadway (in an ill-judged 1997 staging).  Yet for all its charm, intelligence and musical allure, Candide, like its protagonist, remains something of an orphan.  A recent doorstop tome, Broadway: The American Musical, mentions it only in passing — for the coloratura number, "Glitter and Be Gay," that first put Barbara Cook on the map.

In a buoyantly determined if borderline cartoonish concert version, the director and theatrical concert specialist Lonny Price makes the show's tattered fortunes part of this spirited production.  Reverence is the furthest thing from his mind for a show that is all about pluck, serendipity and survival at all costs.

An A-list class, including Broadway darling Kristin Chenoweth (Wicked and now TV's "The West Wing"), grande dame Patti LuPone and opera singers Paul Groves and Sir Thomas Allen, are filmed in their Avery Fisher Hall dressing rooms suiting up for action as the bubbly overture rolls.  The onstage chorus uses cards, like a football cheering section, to flash various messages and captions ("Ka-Boom" for a volcano) to the audience.  A judge apes Donald Trump — and, yes, he gets to say "You're fired."  Price, who directed this live performance at Lincoln Center in May as well as the TV translation, is credited for adapting the book.

The point Price's version makes is in harmony with the show itself.  Human folly and hope are eternal.  In this "best of all possible worlds," as the bemused lyrics go, happiness is a happenstance equation of luck, perseverance, oblivion and innocent belief, all of it played out in the face of misery and blight.  "We'll build our house and chop our wood," the company sings, in a thrilling anthem to the ordinary at the end of the show, "and make our garden grow."

The trip to that verdant vision is a riotously bumpy one.  It begins in an 18th century Westphalian school, when the bastard Candide (Groves), the privileged Cunegonde (Chenoweth), Cunegonde's snarky gay brother Maximillian (Jeff Blumenkrantz) and a curvy servant (Janine LaManna) take their wisdom from the sage and sublimely mad Dr. Pangloss (Allen, who doubles as a narrator).

In this Enlightenment castle, which Price gratuitously likens to cartoonist Al Capp's Dogpatch, life is larky, pre-sexual and perennially sunny.  When one of the students frets about the meaning of war, Pangloss blithely counters that it's "a blessing in reverse."

Bernstein's brilliant score, brightly if somewhat raggedly performed by the New York Philharmonic under Marin Alsop, ruffles its optimistic patter with sly rhythmic premonitions.  Then, with mock-martial urgency, it summons up a war that will separate Candide from his Platonic sweetheart Cunegonde and set the whirling plot in motion.

The story darts from the Spanish Inquisition to the salons of Paris, Montevideo to Constantinople.  Price, as he did in his 2001 televised Sweeney Todd at Davies Hall, ignores static concert conventions and keeps both cast and chorus charging on, off and around the stage.  This Candide is in all but perpetual motion.  Even the camera gets the shakes when the earthquake hits.  Entertaining as it is to watch, Candide can't help but raise a lingering regret: This is a show that deserves to be seen and heard in fully theatrical terms.

The cast expresses the show's bristling energy as well, grinning and winking at their lines as they go.  Sometimes it goes too far.  Chenoweth's account of "Glitter and Be Gay," a courtesan's frantically ambivalent reflection on her lot, suffers from a shade too much stage business and musical undercutting.  But her prodigious gifts and vivid presence — even more striking live than onscreen — compensate.  Her Cunegonde is a high-octane, Betty Boop-meets-Beverly Sills feat.

Groves, who looks perpetually stunned in his blue knee pants, suspenders and boxy haircut, fills in an otherwise routine Candide with a lavish, creamy voice.  His physically hulking Candide and Chenoweth's elfin Cunegonde make an endearing pair, their rear ends jutting as they join for a first, gawky kiss.  They are sweetly, mutually obtuse in their duets, "Oh, Happy We" and "You Were Dead, You Know." Among its many other virtues, Bernstein's score overflows with ensemble writing.

LuPone makes the most of her big number as the Old Lady ("I Am Easily Assimilated"), a louche, rollicking turn that recalls her work as Mrs. Lovett in the Davies Hall Sweeney.  Allen is a steady, droll presence as Dr. Pangloss.  Blumenkrantz wrings every ounce from his sulky role.  LaManna is a perky Pacquette.

Candide lags in the second act, which devotes two full numbers to the voluptuous tedium of worldly pleasures.  But no viewer should give up before the end, which spins a homily about the rewards of work into one of Broadway's most ravishing final numbers.  When soloists and chorus join forces in "Make Our Garden Grow," Candide leaves off its frantic search for solid ground and finds it in Bernstein's ample, swelling climax.

There may be no more daunting task in the musical theater than mounting a coherent production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide.  Truth be told, the thing has all the logic and consistency of a saloon argument at 2 a.m.

Last May, the New York Philharmonic dove into this wild-and-crazy musical setting of Voltaire's satirical novel of 1759.  The stage of Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall was populated by the formally garbed Phil, a chorus in bright yellow and blue, and a stellar cast of costumed, perpetually mugging soloists.  It was a high-profile event, drawing oodles of critics and New York's beautiful people (Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, for example).  The reviews of this semi-staging were mixed — which always seems to be the case with Candide.  This week PBS airs a two-hour Great Performances program that captures all of the fun, as well as the lameness, of that production.

Local music lovers will be relieved to know that in the eye of this swirling Candide hurricane stands our own Marin Alsop — conducting the gathered forces with calm assurance, displaying an attention to detail and a keen ear for pacing and tempo that keep this extravaganza from self-destructing. 

There's little point in describing the plot, which seems quite happy in making no sense whatsoever.  Characters die horrible deaths, only to return healthy and happy the following scene.  The action shifts constantly and illogically to exotic places all over the planet, including that fabled paradise, El Dorado - a perfectly boring resort, as it turns out. 

Hesitant viewers need only know that the cast is headed by two of the most wickedly talented women in the musical theater: Patti LuPone and Kristin Chenoweth (the latter on leave from the show, Wicked).  Either of these performers is worth the time — but to watch them interact with each other and with the elegant Sir Thomas Allen and the clear-voiced Met tenor Paul Groves gives this show major credibility. 

Musically, then, it's terrific.  Alas, the singers and instrumentalists must be seen and heard through the goofy stage direction of Lonny Price, who too often resorted to excess and camp, when a dash of restraint and subtlety would have sufficed. 

For example, in the midst of the Auto-da-fé ("It's a lovely day for drinking/and for watching people fry"), one of the judges is a Donald Trump look-alike, who declares, "You're fired!" while reading his autobiography.  Elsewhere, the chorus helps Candide (Groves) pack his bags, passing along a baseball glove and, for some dumb reason, an LP of Bernstein's West Side Story.  Seated in bleachers above the stage, the Westminster Symphonic Chorus often joins in on the shenanigans — donning Groucho disguises, Hawaiian shirts and such, providing card stunts that are sometimes amusing but usually superfluous. 

Viewed from a distance, this staging seems little more than a loud, madcap evening that ends, unexpectedly, with a touching ballad ("Make Our Garden Grow").  Thankfully, the medium of television allows us to zoom in to the brilliant cast — although you often must fight through the annoying PBS pop-ups that remind us what network and program we're watching. 

As Cunegonde, Chenoweth is a pint-sized marvel, combining impeccable timing, an amazing soprano voice and stunning beauty (she smilingly sings of her "memorable mammaries" at one point).  As it should be, "Glitter and Be Gay" is a fabulous show-stopper in her hands. 

Almost stealing the show is LuPone (The Old Lady), who possesses one of the biggest and most engrossing mouths in show-biz (made even bigger by a large dollop of red lipstick).  The role calls for exaggerated accents, ribald shtick (so why indeed does The Old Lady have only one buttock?) and big-time belting.  LuPone makes the most of her introductory aria, "I Am Easily Assimilated," and is comically shooed off the stage by Chenoweth before "Glitter and Be Gay." 

Groves and Allen are equally wonderful — though the latter, as Pangloss, must also spend much of his time as Narrator, stuck behind a stage-left lecturn.  Supporting roles are sung well, if overly camped up, by Jeff Blumenkrantz (Maximillian) and Janine LaManna (Paquette).  Almost lost in all this, Alsop and the New York Philharmonic nimbly bring out the colorful sounds, catchy tunes and herky-jerky rhythms in Bernstein's busy score.

Leonard Bernstein's Candide isn't a Broadway show as much as a veritable library of music written, rewritten and massaged between its unsuccessful 1956 inception and Bernstein's 1990 death — and now mined by whatever major production is in the works.

The latest is Leonard Bernstein's Candide in Concert, a semi-staged presentation by the New York Philharmonic and PBS's Great Performances.  If only because the cast is headed by Broadway divas Kristin Chenoweth and Patti LuPone, theater buffs will tune in.  It is the law.  No consensus, however, is likely to emerge in tomorrow's chat rooms.

Though Bernstein's Offenbach-with-razor-blades score contains some of his best work, the show never reached definitive form.  Nobody agrees when, if ever, the show has achieved the necessary balance of serious intent and lightness of touch.

The satire, inspired by Voltaire's 18th-century novella, concerns a collection of innocents losing their mental and sexual virginity while being knocked around like pinballs from the Spanish Inquisition to wars on multiple continents.  Original librettist Lillian Hellman was full of coded commentary on McCarthy-ism.  In the 1973 Hal Prince revision, the adventures were about clever scenery changes and hot sex.

Aiming toward the latter pole, the PBS telecast is, in any case, a masterpiece of casting: No orchestra was closer to Bernstein than the New York Philharmonic, and conductor Marin Alsop is his star protege.  No Broadway baby has the comic and vocal chops of Chenoweth (Cunegonde), and, as her sidekick The Old Lady, LuPone need only be a dethroned Evita to get it right.  Opera tenor Paul Groves has one tiresome facial expression — wide-eyed — but sings transcendently.  Doubling as narrator and Dr. Pangloss, British baritone Thomas Allen may be the best thing that's ever happened to these roles.

The controversial element is Lonny Price's ceaselessly inventive staging.  Most of the music holds the stage easily without distracting gags, and the sprawling plot always benefits from simplicity.  Even the Westminster Symphonic Choir wears color-coordinated T-shirts and plays with silly props.  The look is that of a Boston Pops concert with an outsize budget.

Punch lines are treated like grand slams in a broad performing style that's at odds with the show's witty clash between 18th-century stylization and off-handed, 20th-century irreverence.  Songs such as "You Were Dead, You Know" are funny because characters maintain poise and formality while behaving as if their unexplained resurrections aren't unusual.

After the 10th time the choir holds up a network of signs that telegraph who's coming and going, you become resigned to this being a laugh-at-any-cost series of showbiz turns without a point of view.  And with so many Broadway in-jokes, will those theater-struck kids out in Nebraska make head or tail of it?

The telecast's anchor is conductor Alsop, who with great style and solidity leads a pick-and-choose version of the score that almost works, up until the final moments.

All good versions of Candide have the characters bottoming out on their moral corruption, giving the final song, "Make Our Garden Grow," cathartic significance.  Here, Candide simply declares that it's time to settle down.  That's not good enough.