lang Show a Good Fit for Center

k.d. lang was a fitting herald of change Friday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

The Canadian singer has been shifting moods and styles album by album as she explores the possibilities of her striking vocal talent.

The local arts hall, open since 1986, has finally shaken loose from a self-limiting straitjacket that long prevented even the most grown-up and intelligent pop from being booked.

With lang, more than with two previous evenings of pop nostalgia with Ray Charles and Art Garfunkel, the center has gotten around to exploring the possibilities of pop and rock as a living and developing musical movement. (Center officials still get squeamish when they think of booking anything that might be labeled “rock,” but they’ll get used to the idea that just as there are significant differences between “Don Giovanni” and “Cats,” there are differences between, say, Bob Dylan and Ozzy Osbourne.)

Of course, not all changes work. lang’s most recent stylistic turn, toward the forgettable R&B-lite; of her new album, “All You Can Eat,” can (we hope) be taken as a detour rather than a destination.

After a rewarding early period as a different sort of country singer and a fruitful sally into lush romantic pop balladry on her “Ingenue” album, lang (the lower-case letters are her affectation, not ours) has stumbled.

Perhaps wanting to emulate Roxy Music’s sublimely melodic, R&B-flavored; romantic song cycle “Avalon,” (one of her new numbers, “Acquiesce,” nicks one of the Roxy record’s rhythmic grooves), she instead wound up with a bland approximation of boring latter-day Steve Winwood.

Nine songs from “All You Can Eat”--only a couple of them moderately interesting--took up half the room on lang’s concert plate. That still allowed for a decent helping of treats, among them a show-stopping rendition of the Roy Orbison gem “Crying,” a fine performance of lang’s yearning original “Constant Craving” and a tasty sampling from her days as a cowgirl with alternately campy and fervent takes on country tradition.

lang seemed to be fighting a cold, and her usually pure voice at times took on a grainy cast. Still, she impressed with exceptional power, range, supple decorations and, above all, the warmth and believable, human-scale emotion that set her above the likes of such perhaps technically more gifted golden throats as Mariah Carey (whom lang playfully mocked at one point) and Whitney Houston.

lang stitched together the show’s predominantly lighthearted songs with playful banter and humorous asides; the famously out-of-the-closet singer engaged her substantial lesbian contingent of fans--and anyone else who enjoys a chuckle--with clever indirection and light double-entendre. If only performers of whatever persuasion could always address sexuality with stage chat of such zestful wit and charm.

One of lang’s problems as she reaches and stretches has been a tendency toward stilted affectation and downright carelessness in her lyric writing.

After doing fine with the directness of their country songs, she and writing partner Ben Mink have strained at times to seem urbane and poetic with the pop of “Ingenue” and “All You Can Eat.”

Their shortcomings showed in the chorus of the evening’s catchy opening keynote tune, “Sexuality,” in which seductress lang urges the hesitant object of her desires to “Release yourself upon me / And free the hounds of chastity / Release your sexuality on me.”

lang’s drift is obvious, but the canine metaphor, as executed, is a goof that unintentionally calls forth images of Phyllis Schlafly setting a pack of Dobermans loose to break up the hanky-panky.

Surely, nobody craving carnal rapture wants chastity’s woofing servants nipping at the bedsheets. If lang wants to be a pop sophisticate, she’s going to have to do better than this.

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Now that OCPAC’s own pop-allergic hounds have gone unheeded for one artistically noteworthy and financially successful engagement, what seductive attractions should be next?

(A center spokesman reported after lang’s show that “we did very well,” with paying customers filling about 2,700 of the hall’s 2,994 seats; given that she played the 6,200-seat Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles just seven weeks ago and that the Costa Mesa date was announced only five weeks in advance, it demonstrates the sales potential for good pop attractions in O.C.’s finest concert space.)

Realistically, OCPAC will not become a steady venue for pop and rock, at least not until a projected second concert auditorium is added.

Its founding purpose and essential obligation is to present classical music and dance, opera and Broadway shows. In the Pond of Anaheim and Irvine Meadows, it has bigger, better-connected competitors for pop talent.

But sometimes major pop and rock performers want to play in more intimate surroundings for a change of pace, and to give their fans a special treat--Peter Gabriel and Sting have played Southern California dates in theaters within the past few years.

In terms of the notice and, yes, artistic cachet they would bring the center, it could be worth some schedule juggling, if need be, to accommodate their likes.

Staging three to six modern pop/adult rock dates a year at the center, and making them count artistically, seems a reasonable goal.

Put out the word to Van Morrison, Lou Reed and Joni Mitchell, who haven’t had a place to play in O.C. in recent memory, and to the likes of Dylan, Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, Mark Knopfler, Carlos Santana, David Byrne, Eric Clapton, Alison Krauss and Paul Simon. Be a little daring and invite R.E.M. the next time it tours.

Issue standing invitations to Jackson Browne, who went to high school in Fullerton, and to Bonnie Raitt, whose forebears for three generations lived in Orange County.

Pop and rock are performing arts too, lots of people love ‘em, and the possibilities are endless.