A clunky ‘Candide’

With Opera Pacific’s clumsy new production of “Candide,” unveiled Tuesday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, let the debate begin again.

Just about everyone agrees that this score contains Leonard Bernstein’s most inspired theater music, but hardly anyone agrees about anything else. Is it musical comedy or opera? Is it silly satire or something a lot more serious? Can we, should we, dare we stage it?

Can’t we just live happily ever after with its great numbers? Numbers, you say? Arias, say I!

Bernstein thought he could settle the controversy right from the start. When the show opened on Broadway in 1956, he wrote a piece for the New York Times that took the form of an interview between the composer and his id. “My dear Id,” he concluded, hoping to put the issue to rest, “who ever said it wasn’t an operetta?”

Broadway audiences readily accepted the argument that it wasn’t a musical, and the show closed after two months. The blame was laid on Lillian Hellman’s book and on the sheer impossibility of transferring the absurdities of Voltaire’s satire to the stage. Over the years, impressive writers and directors worked on and reworked “Candide” until it moved gradually -- though not completely -- from Broadway to the opera house.

In fact, “Candide” is music theater (exactly what kind no longer matters) waiting for the right director and musical team. As Bernstein showed when he finally conducted it for the first time, in a 1989 concert performance in London a year before his death, the piece, for all its fabulous wit and sparkling melody, is one of serious political thought and near religious transcendence.

The basic premise is that if you believe that this is the best of all possible worlds, you are a dangerous idiot -- the inspiration for the show was that Hellman and Bernstein believed Sen. Joseph McCarthy to be the biggest and most dangerous idiot of all and that this is what his witch hunt for communists really signified.

But something important happens as Voltaire’s hapless hero, his absurdly optimistic tutor, Dr. Pangloss, and the ingenue Cunegonde cheerfully undergo one over-the-top torture after another. They suddenly see there is more to life than riches and political power.

Their conversion to a simple life is one of the great spiritual transformations in modern theater, but making it convincing has thrown more than one experienced director. Opera Pacific turned to a young one, Jeffrey Lentz, with the hope, perhaps, of something fresh. What it got, instead, was 2 1/2 hours’ worth of cheap burlesque followed by 15 minutes of deep emotion, when all the trappings of farce simply drop away.

Actually, it is hard to gauge just what Opera Pacific is up to with this “Candide.” It has gone to some trouble, but not enough. For sets, it uses projections created by Jerome Sirlin that cleverly produce a cinematic ambience, allowing this footloose show to easily move around the globe. But such projections, which were all the rage 15 years ago, look dated by comparison with the latest virtual-reality multimedia techniques. They looked particularly bad Tuesday when the spots kept missing the actors.

The company also went to the trouble of hiring a rising star, the exciting young coloratura Laura Claycomb, as Cunegonde. (Lynette Tapia will sing the role Sunday.) Claycomb sang the signature “Glitter and Be Gay” with hilarious ease, and her transformation from sexy silly goose to woman of depth at the end was wonderful. But no one else in the cast was on her level. And so powerful was she at the end that you realized how wasted she was earlier when offered little more than sitcom-level horseplay.

John DeMain conducted efficiently, and he overcame the orchestra’s initial sloppiness, rising to the big moments. But nothing sounded quite right. Amplification was used for spoken dialogue and at least some of the singing. It never helped the singers. Often, when a musical number started, the voices seemed to fade away. Had the show been fabulous, that alone would have spoiled it.

Consequently, it was hard for the cast, other than the extraordinary Claycomb, to make a strong impact. Richard Troxell was nonetheless a dashing Candide and a deep one in his final aria, “Nothing More Than This.” Frank Hernandez, the twit Maximillian, is a funny actor, and so is Judith Christin, the Old Lady. Given the best of all possible sound systems, William Parcher might have made an effective Dr. Pangloss.

*

‘Candide’

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: Today and Saturday, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.

Price: $40-$185