ODD NIGHTS AT OPERA IN N.Y.

Franco Zeffirelli, having all but destroyed Verdi’s “Otello” on the silver screen, does his mighty worst to smother Puccini’s “Turandot” on the overladen and beleaguered stage of the Metropolitan Opera.

As if to prove that a lot less can mean a lot more, the same company brings back John Dexter to oversee a marvelously poignant revival of Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites” on a virtually empty stage.

Two well-seasoned pros, one of them miscast, do their estimable best to enliven “Samson et Dalila” in a soggy, 23-year-old, Met production that vacillates between bleak oratorio and hootchy-kootch extravaganza.

Meanwhile, Broadway meekly tries its hand at operatic pretension with a shameless, slick and easy celebration of banality called “Les Miserables.”

Meanwhile, back at Lincoln Center, the New York City Opera casts a commercial eye on the Broadway musical with a square, quaint and eminently pretty production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific.”

New York, New York, it’s a helluva town.

The glamorous season at the Metropolitan Opera, where the top ticket fetches nearly $100, is winding down. Still, there is ample time for star-gazing, for circus indulgences and for hysteria. The hottest ticket in town, at the moment, is the new “Turandot,” a replica of sorts of a sprawling production Zeffirelli concocted for La Scala in Milan. At the last performance of the season (April 9), scalpers are doing a brisk black-market business on Lincoln Center plaza.

Inside the opera house, which the ever-observant Zeffirelli himself once reportedly likened to “a nice, big jukebox,” the audience exudes glitz.

Birgit Nilsson, the definitive Turandot of the previous generation, strolls down the aisle to her seat in the second row and basks in an automatic ovation. She has come, no doubt, to check up on the theatrical splendors of the new age. She also may want to check out her celebrated successor as the icy Chinese princess, the Hungarian prima donna Eva Marton.

Conspicuously seated nearby is none other than Elizabeth Taylor, a Hollywood-style diva who, believe it or not, has been cast as a quasi-fictitious semi-Grecian operatic soprano in an upcoming Zeffirelli film. She is here, no doubt, to soak up some authentic cultural atmosphere.

The rubber-necking groupies, both operatic and cinematic, are delirious.

The general delirium continues even after the curtain rises. It reaches staggering proportions when the curtain falls. New York loves a good show.

The Zeffirelli “Turandot” certainly is a good show. Unfortunately, it also happens to be a rather awful “Turandot.”

The Italian director-designer has built the entire city of Peking on the stage. He has brought in decorations from every Chinese restaurant in Western civilization. In a wild jumble of styles and dramatic impulses, he has simulated lavish costumes and fantastic masks from half-remembered Noh plays and a mock-Peking Opera, from unabashed Minsky’s and undigested Bugaku, from Grand Guignol and Technicolored fantasy sagas and little children’s nightmares.

He has drafted armies of extras, the most prominent ones beefy and bare-chested. He has crowded the stage with steps and platforms and pagodas and scenic structures that pop up and disappear at will. He has turned the mighty Met chorus into scenery.

Apologists for this costly and mindless exercise in chic chinoiserie claim it merely reflects the basically tawdry impulses in Puccini’s music. Balderdash.

For all its exotic touches and flamboyant flirtations, “Turandot” remains a poignant, even urgent study of credible human emotions and motivations. It is a wonderful opera about love and fear, about life and death, about yearning and fulfillment. Zeffirelli makes it a garish opera about cheap picture-postcards.

With so many people milling about the cluttered stage in this sonically enhanced tableau mortant , it is often impossible to find the principals. It is also difficult for the conductor to enforce momentum and musico-dramatic focus.

Under the circumstances, one notices that Mme. Marton has a big, dark, somewhat unsteady voice that she uses with ease but without much imagination in the dangerous, high-lying title role. One also laughs, unwittingly, at her second-act costume, which sprouts long, symbolic banners at the shoulders during the riddle scene.

One notices that the ever-forceful Placido Domingo, whose tenor cracks on the exposed high C of “In questa reggia,” is less than ideally cast as the heroic Calaf.

One notices that Aprile Millo, singing her first Liu, can spin endless, exquisite pianissimo tones. One also wishes she would stop hyper-gesticulating. When surrounded by all the Zeffirelli distractions, her only hope for self-assertion is vocal, not physical.

John Macurdy emits waves of black-basso sound as Timur. Hugues Cuenod, 84, manages to magnetize sympathy for a moment or two as the decaying Emperor. The others--even Ping, Pang and Pong--remain ciphers.

In the pit, James Levine attends stodgily, loudly and slowly to the blighted needs of the overpowered Puccini--and, in the traditional, truncated finale, to those of the undervalued Alfano.

The Met looks and sounds like a very different house when the bill is Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites.” The stark business on the stage involves art, not pretension. The masses, alas, are not much interested. One laments rows and rows of empty seats.

The production devised by John Dexter and designed by David Reppa in 1977 places all the action on a gigantic cruciform that dominates a raked stage. Minimal props and atmospheric lighting effects define varying locales with poetic simplicity. The bleak setting brings into bold focus the bravery of the Carmelite nuns as they contemplate the cruel destiny imposed upon them by the French Revolution.

For the current revival, the Met has mustered an ensemble of extraordinarily sensitive singing actresses. At most performances, Maria Ewing portrays the sympathetic, terror-crazed, ultimately heroic Blanche. Her place is taken on this occasion by Kaaren Erickson, who sings with affecting radiance, acts with unassuming pathos and articulates the excellent English translation of Joseph Machlis with perfect clarity. She is deftly complemented by the sweet, limpid-toned Constance of Dawn Upshaw (a worthy successor to the long definitive, now somewhat squeaky Betsy Norden).

The senior sisters include the instantly assertive Jessye Norman, almost too opulently cast as the new Prioress, and the unforgettable Regine Crespin, making her unheralded Met adieu in the harrowing death scene of Madame de Croissy. Florence Quivar is the appreciative Mother Marie.

The weakest element in the proceedings involves the conducting. The venerable Manuel Rosenthal all but ignores the singers while slowly stirring a nice, sentimental Poulenc soup in the pit.

The production, incidentally, is to be televised nationally by PBS on May 6. (KCET Channel 28 catches up on May 10 at 2 p.m.) It should go far to restore the credibility of opera in general, and of opera at the Met in particular, as valid musical drama.

Valid musical drama has nothing to do with the Met’s “Samson et Dalila” production, which, as devised by Nathaniel Merrill and Robert O’Hearn, juxtaposes Cecil B. DeMille silliness and Wieland Wagner abstraction. The somnolent conducting of Jean Fournet does little to revive one’s faith in the great Gallic tradition. The protagonists, nevertheless, sustain interest.

At 60, the great Jon Vickers still commands the heroic ring, the imposing physique, the requisite dignity and the dynamic sensitivity of an ideal Samson. Under the circumstances, it is easy to forgive his mannered slow-motion choreography, not to mention his desperate fortissimo lunge at the high B-flat at the end of “Mon coeur s’ouvre a ta voix.”

Marilyn Horne’s big, low-dipping mezzo-soprano seems a bit brash and harsh for Dalila’s most seductive phrases. On April 13 she tends to sing flat and all but loses her voice in Act II. Luckily, she is restored to resplendent vocal health for the April 18 broadcast, and one never doubts her authority. Her idea of acting, unfortunately, still goes no further than the second-arm attitudes of a silent-movie vamp.

Drama critics may like “Les Miserables.” Judging by the box-office reports, ordinary New Yorkers are responding to the siren call at the Broadway Theatre in record numbers. Victor Hugo scholars and music critics, however, may tend to be less easily enchanted with this candy-coated opera.

Yes. Wretched though it may be, it is an opera.

It makes all its points in music. It employs no unaccompanied dialogue. It uses recitative to advance the drama, arias--songs, if you will--to expand the emotions, ensembles to raise communal temperatures and thicken plot textures.

Unfortunately, the authors don’t--or cannot--go through the operatic motions with class, with style or with a modicum of originality. “Les Miserables” merely settles for comfy, old-fashioned tricks and hoary devices.

Claude-Michel Schoenberg (that’s his real name) has cranked out an all-purpose score by the yard. It mixes portentous Andrew Lloyd Webberish schmaltz with pretentious semi-nouveau rock-schlock with ancient operetta cliches with Bernsteinian slush-pump sentiment. Echoes of the pickpocket chorus from “Oliver!” comingle with macho thumps all too reminiscent of “Stout-Hearted Men.”

The general tone is hardly uplifted by Herbert Kretzmer’s puerile lyrics, which seem to think the name Marius rhymes with the phrase “ahead of us.” The blur of the infernal overamplification system hardly helps matters.

The huge cast works diligently, under Trevor Nunn’s fluid direction. Colm Wilkinson croons a pretty pianissimo as Valjean, and Terrence Mann does a faithful Scarpia imitation as Javert. The complex sets of John Napier earn a round of applause when structural ends finally meet in the barricades scene.

However, the most excitement at the April 8 matinee is generated by a false fire alarm which halts the performance in mid-act and sends the audience into the street for a welcome, unscheduled intermission.

If a Broadway show can be an opera, why can’t an opera company put on a Broadway show? No reason, reasons Beverly Sills as she produces her version of “South Pacific” at the State Theater.

There is nothing operatic about the New York City Opera version, directed by Gerald Freedman. It simply is the “South Pacific” we know and used to love, now decorated with elaborate picture-book sets by Desmond Heeley and bravely performed by an authentic musical-comedy team in an uncomfortably vast theatrical space.

The war-time plot about the young cock-eyed optimist from corny Kansas who falls in love with a middle-aged French planter who once had married a Polynesian woman--say it isn’t so!--creaks a bit these days. The songs remain marvels of charm and character, however, and the recitatives--most notably the one preceding “Younger Than Springtime”--still are models of poignant economy.

At the April 15 matinee, Justino Diaz offers a solid, intelligent, mellifluous Pinza imitation as Emile de Becque, disappointing only those who want animal magnetism or a pianissimo at the end of “Some Enchanted Evening.” Susan Bigelow makes a nice, perky little hick of Nellie and, thank goodness, doesn’t sing like Kiri Te Kanawa. Tony Roberts gobbles up the con-man platitudes of Luther Billis.

Richard White sings a fervent Lt. Cable, though a genuine operatic tenor might have been more useful here. Ironically, Muriel Costa-Greenspon, a regular City Opera contralto, musters the garrulous whimsy of Bloody Mary better than the should-be hearty legato of “Bali Ha’i.”

The lyric muse is alive and perverse in Fun City.