VOLTAIRE--BERNSTEIN STYLE : N. Y. EXPORTS ‘CANDIDE’ TO ORANGE COUNTY

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.