DANCE REVIEW : L.A. Chamber Ballet Stages Woody Allen’s ‘Dmitri’

From the moment Thursday when its printed synopsis appeared on a front curtain at the Japan America Theatre--almost as wide as the proscenium and almost as intimidating as Holy Writ--”Dmitri” aimed to be the story ballet to end all story ballets.

A one-act amalgam of the inanities we endure in “Giselle,” “Petrushka,” “The Nutcracker” and other classics, this newest offering from the ceaselessly resourceful Los Angeles Chamber Ballet also satirized the latest novelty of classical restagings: a switcheroo of locale.

You liked the Creole “Giselle” and the Hollywood “Cinderella”? Well, here, courtesy of designer Mark Stock, Giselle’s quaint little hut in the vineyards became a stucco tract home in the Valley, with a freeway where Albrecht’s castle used to be.

You won’t find any scenic update in the ballet’s celebrated literary source, a scenario by Woody Allen published in Allen’s 1975 book “Without Feathers.” Allen also didn’t specify the grab-bag Verdi score or the drunken hornpipe, antic czardas or lusty divertissement for three harlots-cum-Gypsies: refugees, no doubt, from some tacky version of “Romeo and Juliet.”

Choreographer Stanley Holden clearly had scores to settle from his years at the Royal Ballet: The best jokes in “Dmitri” were at the expense of character dancing and character mime, Holden’s career specialties. (Holden also appeared onstage, in Maria Ouspenskaya drag, as the Gypsy Fortune-Teller, another character not in the scenario.) And often the small, sharp lampoon that Allen created got lost in the demented melees that Holden set in motion--especially at the end when we never really had time to watch the title character (a puppet-with-a-soul) “on the roof of the Merchants Bank, drinking haughtily from a bottle of Air Wick.”

However, even Allen’s scenario acknowledged that “the action becomes confused” at this point, and “Dmitri” had a lot going for it--especially the deliciously pseudo-exquisite performance of Madelyn Berdes as its heroine. Allen named the character Natasha, and is it a coincidence that the Giselle in the mid-’70s was a ballerina with that nickname? Or that Berdes’ portrayal Thursday embodied nearly all the memorable mannerisms of that ballerina?

In any case, “Dmitri” crowned an otherwise sober program featuring a revision of the 1988 Raiford Rogers/Lloyd Rodgers opera-ballet “Orpheus”: improved but still sketchy about major plot points and inclined to settle for generalized formal dancing where purposeful, expressive choreography was needed.

Rogers’ new neoclassic “Symphonie No. 4” fluently showcased the company, but never succeeded in building dance phrases that evolved seamlessly, effortlessly, inevitably to match its unmatchable Mozart accompaniment.

Patrick Frantz’s new duet “Andante Cantabile” took on the life and music of Robert Schumann--drawing unfortunate comparisons to George Balanchine’s late masterpiece “Davidsbundlertanze.” Sensitively danced by Victoria Koenig and Laurence Blake (also the leads in “Orpheus”), it seemed competently crafted but more like an excerpt from a story ballet than a complete work.

Both “Andante Cantabile” and “Orpheus” boasted live music, with countertenor Dennis Parnell again virtuosic as Ovid in the latter work.