PROGRAM 2 BY SAN FRANCISCO BALLET

The credibility of San Francisco Ballet’s current stance took something of a beating Sunday night in Royce Hall, UCLA. New artistic director Helgi Tomasson may well be leading the company away from the vulgar theatricality exemplified by former director Michael Smuin. However, the stylish, assured dancing the company used to bring to its neoclassic repertory proved in short supply on the four-part program.

Certainly, San Francisco Ballet has never danced Balanchine as badly in Los Angeles as it danced “Brahams-Schoenberg Quartet.” If anything, Tomasson’s own “Menuetto”--a recent City Ballet acquisition with a strong neo-Balanchine imprint--looked even worse.

Created in 1966 for such distinctive stars as Melissa Hayden, Patricia McBride, Edward Villella, Allegra Kent, Suzanne Farrell and Jacques d’Amboise, the plotless Balanchine showpiece took its lush style and imposing scale from Schoenberg’s brass-heavy orchestrations of a Brahms piano quartet.

Although the corps looked well drilled, the ballet succumbed Sunday to ruinous casting of principal roles: bizarre misalliance (the diminutive firebrand David McNaughton opposite the statuesque, lyrical Ludmila Lopukhova in the Andante), insecurity due to inexperience (company newcomer Simon Dow in the Allegro), debilitating blandness (Wendy Van Dyck in the Intermezzo) and sheer ineptitude (Alexander Topciy in the Gypsy Rondo).

Set to Mozart’s Divertimento No. 17, Tomasson’s 1984 “Menuetto” used four principals and a shifting number of soloists in artful and often quietly surprising combinations and stylistic gradations: a fresh and sophisticated exploration of formalism. If only the company could dance it adequately.

Dow managed to rise to the occasion with partnering of genuine suavity, but Evelyn Cisneros punched out steps vacantly, as if dancing in some metaphysical funk. Van Dyck capitalized on ravishing port de bras but consistently smeared her pointe-work and Jim Sohm kept confusing elegance with mannerism. In their bravura opportunities, the three overeager subsidiary men flung themselves wildly out of both synch and proper placement.

Under the circumstances, the best dancing Sunday occurred in home-grown (pre-Tomasson) repertory: Lew Christensen’s familiar “Con Amore” (1953) and Val Caniparoli’s recent “Hamlet and Ophelia” duet. Christensen arranged Rossini overtures in a nostalgic lampoon--Romantic fantasy and bedroom farce diced, spliced and served up with enormous gusto by Laurie Cowden, Tracy-Kai Maier and Linda Montaner.

Exalting overblown, unmotivated intensity, Caniparoli’s “Hamlet” (to the Largo from Martinu’s first symphony) mined its literary source for cheap thrills and managed to produce at least one humdinger: the rejected Ophelia bourreeing in backbend on Hamlet’s rippling, long black cape--her watery doom glamorously prefigured. Sohm and Joanna Berman danced this hopeless exercise valiantly.