DANCE REVIEW : Strong Principals Master Hurdles of ‘Romeo and Juliet’

In directing California Ballet for 21 years, Maxine Mahon has never suffered from an inferiority complex.

Besides tackling highly daunting subjects (“Dracula”) and scores (“The Miraculous Mandarin”), Mahon has matched her San Diego dancers against medal-winning Soviet virtuosi and even the filmic perfection of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

So it’s no surprise to find her attempting “Romeo and Juliet,” although her company now can muster only eight male dancers--none of them exactly a classical firebrand or danseur noble.

No matter. Without a home-grown Romeo at her disposal, Mahon recruited former Ballet West principal Mark Lanham to partner the Juliet of San Diego’s own Denise Dabrowski.

Lanham may not be the most boyish or passionate Romeo in ballet history, but on Saturday at the East County Performing Arts Center in El Cajon, his faultless professionalism freed Dabrowski to give a performance so right that it outweighed everything wrong in the choreography by associate director Charles Bennett and the dancing of her colleagues.

Dark, willowy and recklessly emotional, this Juliet believed so strongly in her love for Romeo that her dancing in their duets had extraordinary daring. She would launch into what would become a lift or supported turn, trusting that he would be there, taking big chances with speed, force and especially balance. This is a secret the Soviets have perfected--how to make classical dancing look spontaneous, from the heart--and Dabrowski had clearly mastered its deepest expressive implications.

Patrick Nollett made a conventionally nasty, intriguingly feline Tybalt and David Crookes a lively, sympathetic Mercutio.

Created in 1980, Bennett’s condensed version eliminated Escalus, Rosaline, Benvolio, the marketplace harlots and much of the showpiece dancing to concentrate on the Capulet family tragedies. Often resourceful in dramatic passages, it suffered in lyrical sequences from a lack of flow: a tendency to stop for emblematic poses and then begin anew against the uninterrupted surge of Prokofiev’s score (on tape).

In the last third of the ballet, Bennett even staged scenes to the wrong music--setting mime and dancing to the highly specific accompaniment composed for other moments--and this alone undercut the credibility of the whole performance.

As a curtain-raiser, California Ballet danced Mahon’s “Holberg Suite” (to Grieg), a fluent, neoclassic vehicle for three couples that required more accomplished cavaliers than the company could provide. However, it did suggest the refinement that Karen Evans-Poolos, Sylvia Poolos and Debora Rumney have achieved and might fully reveal with partners of Lanham’s caliber.