N.Y. CITY OPERA IN ORANGE COUNTY : WHOLESALE CAST CHANGES IN ‘CANDIDE’

Tuesday night, the New York City Opera introduced its sappy, saggy and soggy overproduction of Leonard Bernstein’s clever, potentially poignant “Candide” to the Orange County Performing Arts Center. The response was less than rapturous.

Wednesday night, the dauntless company tried again, with a wholesale change of principals. No use.

Harold Prince’s frantic staging--a sprawling, anti-musical, four-ring circus in search of a compelling focal point--is not designed to showcase individual performers. It merely appropriates them for a cutesy marathon of prefabricated hit-’em-over-the-head rituals.

Under the circumstances, one must laud the smoothly functioning B-team for good intentions, for valor against the odds, and for small successes in the assertion of independent perspectives.

The title role fell Wednesday to Robert Tate, who succeeded Cris Groenendaal, who, in turn, had replaced the indisposed David Eisler. Best known to San Francisco Opera audiences for his crisp comprimario portraits, Tate played the guileless quasi-Voltairian fool as a very little L’il Abner from outer mock-Westphalia. He sang handsomely and conveyed the right aura of fatuous innocence, even though he could not exude maximum charm.

Claudette Peterson--the new, rather matronly, saccharine-coated Cunegonde--made a big, shrill, inaccurate sound in the coloratura outbursts and stressed the parody rather than the bravura of the Jewel Song. Where her immediate predecessor had invoked the histrionic spirit of Shirley Temple, Peterson settled for shades of Dale Evans.

Joseph McKee, a baritone, took over the omniscient, multi-faceted, comic-narrator duties from John Lankston, a tenor.

Understandably, McKee encountered some trouble with the high tessitura of the Governor’s song in Act Two (music originally intended for a different sort of singer). He also tended to be hearty where Lankston had been nimble. Nevertheless, he gave an amusing, amiable, deftly delineated performance.

Joyce Castle as the literally half-rumped Old Lady managed to produce the slender, dark tones her Tuesday-night counterpart had lacked. The younger mezzo-soprano gave a sly and poised performance (everything is relative) that suggested a Carmen gone to seed. As such, she conjured up happy memories of the underrated artist who created the character in 1956: Irra Petina.

The smaller roles were in appreciative hands. Maris Clement exulted in the giddy-soubrette platitudes of Paquette. James Javore contributed a sweetly robust Maximilian. Incidentally, despite what this bleary scribe reported yesterday, these two characters are not siblings, just a matched pair of quasi-sexual cliches.

Richard McKee brought equal cunning and increased basso power to the comic routines previously enacted by Jack Harrold. Otherwise it was “Candide” business as usual. Bloated business.

The less-than-capacity audience at Segerstrom Hall became less and less as the evening wore on.