‘GISELLE’ AT SHRINE

“Giselle” can be an antique ritual inhabited by a coy ballerina doll and her danseur swain or it can be a living drama seen through a historic looking glass.

When Cynthia Gregory danced the doomed peasant girl Friday in Shrine Auditorium--with Ross Stretton as Albrecht, the unwitting instrument of her destruction--it was the former. While Gregory is never less than a gifted technician and can blaze with authority in strong-woman roles, here she reminds one of Glenda Jackson trying to portray Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

The problem is compounded by American Ballet Theatre’s casting of Stretton, who, instead of playing on Giselle’s gullibility with teasing tactics that belie hidden depths of feeling, merely is cowed by her. These two hardly could be a worse match in terms of theatrical truth.

Rather than devising an idiosyncratic approach that might work, Gregory tries to graft standard-issue naivete onto the character, with dismal results in the first act and to somewhat better effect in the second, where she can abandon smiling peasantry for netherworld spirituality.

But it was a nondrama that saw Stretton’s bland Albrecht executing solos as though intended for the classroom. Neither did the lyrically fluid Myrta of Carla Stallings come close to conjuring the regal awesomeness of this judicial feminist avenger. Conductor Alan Barker presided over an aptly neat reading of the score.