LOCAL PREMIERE OF ‘SUNSET’ : BALLET THEATRE PRESENTS MIXED BILL

Fewer than 700 people actually paid to see American Ballet Theatre on Thursday. That wouldn’t even be a full house at the intimate Japan American Theatre; in cavernous Shrine Auditorium (which seats 6,226) it is a rank embarrassment.

Of course, the company is arguably reaping what it sows: The advertising for the season emphasizes only full-evening story ballets and mostly relegates the midweek mixed bills to mere listings. Find them if you can.

Certainly the poor attendance Thursday need not indicate lack of interest. After all, the sold-out New York City Ballet engagement in Orange County and the success of the Paul Taylor company’s performances at UCLA last year suggest that local audiences might well want to see a program of Balanchine and Taylor masterworks--if they knew about it.

The local premiere of “Sunset” (reconstructed by Lila York) found Taylor suspending time and dealing directly with intimate feelings of friendship, attraction, impending loss through a fluid, bittersweet reverie involving six men in uniform and the four women in white they flirted with and left behind.

Set to music by Elgar and, in an interlude, recorded bird calls, “Sunset” developed through contrasts between realistic gesture and lyric dance, endearingly silly group gymnastics and duets of piercing eloquence. And it had a gorgeous setting by Alex Katz: an abstraction of trees in spring (splashes of green, slashes of brown), lushly lit by Jennifer Tipton. Magical.

The Joffrey Ballet has proven that classical dancers can approximate Taylor’s modern dance style. However, Ballet Theatre remained largely off-target Thursday, when the choreographer’s familiar stride-jumps looked dead wrong without the weight Taylor’s men give them, and the floor movement was generally clumsy except for Johan Renvall as the sleeper/slider. Kathleen Moore, Robert Hill, John Summers and Dana Stackpole were also prominent in the attractive, hard-working cast.

Both Balanchine’s neo-Romantic “Donizetti Variations” and neo-classic “Theme and Variations” evoked earlier periods in ballet history, but their technical demands marked them as 20th-Century creations made in the U.S.A.

In “Theme,” Julio Bocca proved far from comfortable with the exposed bravura and grueling partnering, but enormously promising. Without putting any personal signature on the ballet, Cheryl Yeager vanquished its hazards expertly. The corps exuded the surety, vigor and scale missing from “Sleeping Beauty” (one of Balanchine’s obvious inspirations for “Theme”), and the new pink and blue costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge made everyone look like spun sugar.

“Donizetti” took forever to warm up--you could almost hear the echo of Balanchine pleading again, “Give more! What are you saving it for?” But eventually, the ragged corps pulled together, Amanda McKerrow danced with all her remarkable lightness and delicacy and Gil Boggs flew through spectacular turns. Charles Barker conducted all three ballets capably.