Judy Kaye, Keith Jameson & Stacey Logan. Photo by Carol Rosegg

To open its spring season, the New York City Opera has revived its 1982 Harold Prince production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide, in "the opera house version" (including almost all music written for the work), last given in 1989 and now staged by Arthur Masella. With an almost completely new cast, headed by opera singers and Broadway stars, under George Manahan's baton, the company's effort proves anew a merry romp through the musical after Voltaire's novel, with book by Hugh Wheeler (replacing the original one written by Lillian Hellman for the 1956 premiere on Broadway) and lyrics by Richard Wilbur, John LaTouche, Stephen Sondheim and Bernstein himself.

Prince presents Candide as a traveling carnival sideshow, complete with stage audience and pantomime animals, and performers singing from and atop side wagon stages, plowing through the front rows of the orchestra, and delivering speeches or firing weapons from the first ring. Whether raped, maimed or murdered, or burned at the stake before an eager crowd in Mardi Gras masks and costumes, the players, as often as not, pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and go about the rest of their business.

The two romantic leads are double cast with engaging young singers. Tenor Keith Jameson, as the eponymous naïve optimist, completely sold on the philosophy taught by his teacher that this is always, any evidence to the contrary, "the best of all possible worlds," sweetly sings Candide's starry-eyed meditation, lament, hopeful ode to "the New World," and, after all his misfortunes, the frank, let's-get-to-work opening of "Make Our Garden Grow," the achingly beautiful finale. In soprano Anna Christy's dazzling account of Candide's infinitely more adaptable love, Cunegonde's coloratura "Glitter and Be Gay," Bernstein's extravagant response to the Jewel Song from Faust, each note, stratospheric or not, is every bit the pearl it should be. Jameson and Christy make their duets, especially "You Were Dead, You Know," with its expansive double cadenza, as glorious as the grand operatic ones they parody. Their worthy alternates are William Ferguson and Georgia Jarman.

Anna Christy (left), John Cullum & Kyle Pfortmiller (right). Photos by Carol Rosegg.

The other cast members appear in all performances. This Candide reunites Judy Kaye and John Cullum, colleagues from Cy Coleman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green's 1978 musical On the Twentieth Century. As the old Polish lady, with but one remaining buttock, Kaye, with impeccable comic timing and thick Vera Galupe-Borszkh accent, frequently steals the spotlight, earning hearty laughter, in an early appearance, with an exasperated "Leave you alone for five minutes!" as she surveys a scene suddenly littered with the bodies of Cunegonde's "sugar daddies," the Orthodox Jew and the Grand Inquisitor, slain by Candide. Kaye makes florid arias of her spoken tales of woe and more than holds her own with the opera singers with her vocalism in "I Am Easily Assimilated," when she leads her decrepit swains in a cheerful dance; the departure quartet, from old Europe for "the New World," at the end of Act One; and the desert island bitch-fest trio "Quiet!" for which she and Jameson are joined by Stacey Logan as a lusty Paquette. Cullum brings versatility and command of the stage to a variety of important parts—the narrating author Voltaire, whose comment about the invading Bulgarian army "slaughtering and liberating the populace" of Westphalia has particular resonance at this time; verbose purveyor of faulty philosophy Dr. Pangloss; lecherous South American governor; and other louche personages. Don't, however, expect at this point, though it may be uncharitable to say so, either the high notes or pear-shaped tones that opera singers bring to his characters' songs or, in the demanding patter of "Bon Voyage," any real singing at all.

Kyle Pfortmiller is all apt attitude and fresh round baritone sound as Cunegonde's vain brother and sometime cross-dresser Maximilian. If the faithful are no longer quite as scandalized as they once were by the religious Jew and the leader of the Inquisition in Lisbon sharing Cunegonde's favors, one wonders what they make of the Latin American monastic order that takes in both Maximilian and Paquette, because "He is of a type that would be most serviceable in our holy fraternity," but "There are some of the holy brethren who still prefer the weaker sex"!

Nanne Puritz and Deborah Lew make their mark as a pair of singing pink sheep, as do Robert Ousley and Eric Michael Gillett in multiple roles, and Gina Ferrall, John Paul Almon, and Christopher Jackson in their assignments.

Candide runs through March 19

New York City Opera at New York State Theater, 20 Lincoln Center

Previews March 4 8 pm; 5 1:30 & 8 pm; 6 1:30 pm

Performances March 8 6:30 pm; 9, 10 & 16 7:30 pm; 11 & 18 8 pm;

12 & 19 1:30 & 8 pm

Tickets $12.50 to $115.50 212/3074100 or http://www.nycopera.com