CRANKO BALLET : JOFFREY INTRODUCES A NEW, BETTER ROMEO AND JULIET

The big guns are supposed to go off on opening night. Second nights, traditionally, are for letdowns.

The Joffrey Ballet, which doesn’t tend to care much about tradition, had it the other way around with its ambitious--probably overambitious--new production of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Wednesday, the company stumbled through a rather perfunctory performance of John Cranko’s often inspired Shakespearean translation, the relatively inexperienced ensemble straining to support a pallid pair of principals. The performance Thursday suffered from a lingering degree of emotional timidity, to be sure. Nevertheless, the temperature rose considerably.

The second “Romeo” didn’t just benefit from higher degrees of dramatic flair and cohesion. It enjoyed the crucial advantage of sympathetic protagonists who could at least sketch the compulsive impetuosity and fatal vulnerability of the star-cross’d lovers.

Glenn Edgerton introduced a nervous, sensitive, emphatically youthful Romeo, a Romeo alert to the awakening of manhood that accompanies the awakening of love. He moved with courtly elegance that seemed unaffected, sustained boyish ardor even when neatly executing Cranko’s feats of Soviet-flavored bravura and threw himself with something close to helpless abandon into the turmoil of the ultimate tragedy.

Dawn Caccamo, a member of the Joffrey company for little more than a year, seemed even more promising--a deft technician, an actress of considerable range, a Juliet in the classic mold. This tiny, dark-eyed, mercurial beauty managed to be giddy but not coy in the early episodes, passionate but not melodramatic in the final scenes. Most important, perhaps, she found a reasonable emotional bridge between the dramatic extremes that was all the more eloquent for its understatement.

It would be unrealistic to pretend that Edgerton and Caccamo already can erase memories of their great predecessors in these demanding, multifaceted challenges. Neither has yet discovered the secret of instantly commanding the stage. Neither has yet found a unique interpretive stance. Asking for such achievements at this point, however, probably would be asking too much.

The important realization involves the future. Both dancers seem to have the right equipment and the right instincts. In this day of faceless mechanical wonders, that is saying quite a lot.

Apart from Philip Jerry, a petulant rather than menacing Tybalt, the remainder of the cast was unchanged. Not incidentally, the large audience once again registered unbridled, undiscriminating enthusiasm.