BALLET REVIEW : ABT Stages a Birthday ‘Offering’

This, in case you’ve been out of the country, is the 50th anniversary season of American Ballet Theatre.

New York celebrated the momentous occasion in January with a nostalgic, star-clotted, gala orgy of variety acts, surrounded by historic home movies. Other cities--San Francisco, for instance--followed suit feebly, mustering a road-show reduction of the Big Show.

Unsentimental Los Angeles, embroiled in a booking dispute with the ABT management, allowed the entire local visit to be canceled. Ergo, as far as Southern California is concerned, Orange County was left to hold high the festive torch for ABT.

Orange County, however, chose to let the torch flicker. The annual season opened at Segerstrom Hall on Tuesday night with business as usual. No fuss, little muss.

Fittingly, perhaps, it was very eclectic business. Something borrowed, something new, something dusty, something tired. . . .

At first glance, the curtain raiser looked specifically festive. After all, it was entitled “Birthday Offering.”

But the birthday in question turned out to be the 25th anniversary of the Sadler’s Wells (soon to be Royal) Ballet in London. This piece d’occasion had been concocted by Frederick Ashton for London back in 1956.

Never mind. It remains a splendid pas de quatorze, set to recycled musical gush by Glazunov. The choreography showcases the classical manners and varying technical specialties of seven ballerinas (some bona-fide, some would-be), each accompanied by a self-effacing cavalier. David Vaughan reports, not incidentally, that the original dancers privately dubbed the vehicle “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

Ashton used his half-hour homage as a glittery exploration of the grand Petipa mystique and the elegant Petipa maneuver. This, if you will, is the refined, quintessentially British equivalent of Balanchine’s “Ballet Imperial.”

In London, the central focus was magnetized and long monopolized by Margot Fonteyn. Here, the dominant duties fell to Susan Jaffe, who seems to have assumed something akin to prima-ballerina status with ABT (she returned in two of the three remaining items on this emphatically mixed bill).

Jaffe exuded proper strength and dignified hauteur, even when executing the daintiest of maneuvers. She brought special finesse to the ultimate pas de deux, making one wish--in vain--that Ashton had succumbed to the temptation of at least one climactic lift.

Ross Stretton partnered her deftly, and with towering ardor. Too bad he was deprived of the indulgence of either of the “Raymonda” solos that Ashton later interpolated for David Blair and Rudolf Nureyev.

Among the subsidiary danseuses, Cheryl Yeager looked pert if not particularly suave, Cynthia Harvey exuded regal serenity, Julie Kent exerted lyric charm, Leslie Browne conveyed febrile strength and Alessandra Ferri was compellingly mercurial, after which Christine Dunham seemed soothingly languid. Their partners mustered an agreeably energetic mazurka.

Mikhail Baryshnikov may have abandoned the company last fall in a regrettably hasty huff. Nevertheless, he has left his successors a roster of well-schooled, disciplined yet fascinatingly dissimilar dancers.

His legacy also includes at least one choreographer of exceptional sensitivity, musicality and wit: Clark Tippet. “Some Assembly Required,” first performed in Washington last April, turns out to be a perky and quirky little duet for Amanda McKerrow and John Gardner.

Inspired by the peppery mock-platitudes of William Bolcom’s Second Sonata for violin and piano, Tippet ties his protagonists in erotic, athletic knots. He toys with the implications of sexual competition, juggles sentimental mush with survival tensions, ultimately permits legato optimism to trample staccato doubt.

It is a lovely, thoughtful, deceptively simple essay. McKerrow, adorable in rustic mufti, floated through it with insinuating determination, revealing a perfect sense of gently dissonant poetry. Gardner, clad in T-shirt and jeans, managed the big gestures, the subtle movement fragments and the moments of passive resolve with equal conviction.

Bolcom’s score was appreciatively played in the pit by Ronald Oakland and Howard Barr. Unfortunately, a badly placed microphone sometimes made a grotesque distortion of the piano tone.

The other half of the program--the reheated half--proved less satisfying. The latest revival of Antony Tudor’s “Jardin aux Lilas” looked dutiful rather than inspired. The gestural nuances seemed generalized, the characterizations bland, the psychological relationships fuzzy. One could admire fine dancing yet feel very little in the process.

Leslie Browne provided a still-promising sketch of Caroline. Guillaume Graffin, undertaking the role for the first time, reduced her lover to a competent, all-purpose cavalier. Michael Owen stalked the stage correctly as Caroline’s betrothed. Susan Jaffe registered prettiness and petulance as the other woman.

It wasn’t enough.

Finally, to bring down the house with push-button certainty came “Push Comes to Shove.” Alas, Twyla Tharp’s delirious dissection of jazzy pop and Russian pomp has not aged well.

It looked so fresh, so effortless, so funny, so brilliant, so marvelously irreverent in 1976. It was danced then by the mischievously deadpan Baryshnikov, the presumably angelic Marianna Tcherkassky and the irresistibly earthy Martine van Hamel.

It looked so tired, so quaint, so forced, so mechanical on Tuesday, danced by the ultra-eager Danilo Radojevic, the eversweet Amanda McKerrow and the ubiquitous Susan Jaffe. It also looked like hard work. Yesterday’s ooh and aah has become today’s ho and hum.

The conducting chores were shared by Emil de Cou and Charles Barker. The Pacific Symphony, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, performed nobly for both competent maestros.