OPERA REVIEW : A Familiar ‘Butterfly’ : For the most part, it was Puccini business as usual in Opera Pacific’s season opener in Orange County.

The mellifluous tear-jerker inspired push-button bravos at the opening of the Opera Pacific season on Saturday. The local “Butterfly” collectors were happy.

The picturesque, mildly exotic proceedings at the Orange County Performing Arts Center attracted a capacity audience in a festive mood. This was a good night for conspicuous dressing, and for humming along with the pathetic heroine when “that tune” finally came along. It was a good night for hanky clutching, as the quaint but inevitable hara-kiri loomed on the veristic horizon. For the most part, this was Puccini business as usual.

It must have been pretty good business. The top tickets for this rather modest production fetched as much as $70. When seats became scarce for the five scheduled performances, the management added a sixth, on Jan. 20.

The fluttering geisha with the heart, throat and box office of gold is alive and well at Segerstrom Hall. She didn’t bring much novelty with her, but the familiar production components assembled on her behalf by David DiChiera and his cohorts hardly bred contempt.

This is the first “Madama Butterfly” presented by Opera Pacific. That, of course, does not make it a new “Madama Butterfly.”

The once-elegant set by Ming Cho Lee was designed for the short-lived touring wing of the Metropolitan Opera back in 1965. The flimsy, semi-stylized Nagasaki abode has been making the rounds ever since. Los Angeles first saw it in 1966, and it returned, courtesy of the Music Center Opera, two decades later.

The grab-bag costumes of Zack Brown, or unreasonable facsimiles thereof, turned up in a San Diego “Butterfly” only two years ago. That southerly version, not incidentally, introduced the rotund but promising Pinkerton of Jonathan Welch, who repeated his sonorously caddish duties here.

The title role was taken in Costa Mesa by the Japanese soprano Yoko Watanabe. Official releases heralded this as her “long-awaited West Coast debut.” That hyperbolic claim managed to overlook the series of performances she gave during the Olympic Arts Festival as Cio-Cio-San’s Chinese cousin, Liu in “Turandot,” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1984. Perhaps Opera Pacific thinks the West Coast ends at Beach Boulevard.

The only genuine surprise in this undertaking involved the performing edition favored by John Mauceri, the gratifyingly inquisitive conductor. Defying tradition and reverting to the composer’s stark original plan, he performed the opera in two, not three, parts.

This created a daunting second act that lasted nearly an hour and a half. The gain in cumulative tension, however, compensated for any strain on the Sitzfleisch .

Mauceri opened a few conventional cuts (it was good to hear more chaos than usual in the wedding chorus), and he reinstated some lovely bridge music during the interlude that accompanies the heroine’s all-night vigil. He even observed some textual niceties that made Butterfly’s sacrifice more noble, less mawkish.

Nevertheless, his quest for authenticity stopped short of depriving Pinkerton of his only aria, which Puccini had added after the failure of the 1904 premiere. Tenors, after all, must be served.

Mauceri the conductor reinforced the inclinations of Mauceri the editor sensitively. Stressing heroic fervor, he avoided sentimental excess wherever possible and favored momentum even in the humming chorus. He accompanied the singers with compassion, though the orchestra sounded rough (underrehearsed?) and, due to the acoustical quirks of the house, very, very loud.

The solid cast was dominated, as any “Butterfly” cast should be, by the protagonist. Watanabe looked sweetly vulnerable, enacted the tragic rituals with welcome restraint, savored a good deal of expressive detail, and sang with luminous, well-focused tones that flirted with danger only in climactic ascending outbursts. Not surprisingly, she chose the lower alternative at what should be the crest of her entrance aria.

Burdened with a preposterously lumpy uniform (of the wrong seasonal color), Welch sounded like an ardent hero and looked like a clumsy buffo. Andreas Poulimenos introduced a strong, almost spiffy Sharpless. Gail Dubinbaum contributed a vocally suave, dramatically aggressive Suzuki.

William Saetre, decked out in quasi-Western finery, offered an intriguingly snippy portrait of Goro, the wheeler-dealer marriage-broker. The others tended to fade into Lee’s canvas landscape.

Gordon Ostrowski, billed in the program as production manager of the USC opera workshop, directed traffic diligently, sometimes a bit fussily, on the cluttered stage.

Francis Rizzo’s supertitles, modified on occasion to accommodate Mauceri’s libretto revisions, clarified the action for the uninitiated. At the same time, the projected translations obliterated the top of the set, distracted attention from the actors and inspired some unwonted mirth.

Some day, perhaps, some really brave, stubborn, unsnobbish impresario who cares about opera as drama will venture an English-language version of this Italian opera about Americans in Japan.

Or is that concept too revolutionary?