Dance : 2 Swanildas, 2 Interpretations in ‘Coppelia’

A doll stirs the love fantasies of the young swain and the old alchemist in “Coppelia.” But it is the real girl, Swanilda, they ultimately contend with and Saturday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, two different impersonators, courtesy of American Ballet Theatre, put the fellas straight.

The matinee boasted a newly seasoned Amanda McKerrow. To her thistledown dancing--so light and effortless and fluid that one must remember the classical technique that underlies it--came an actual characterization.

Gone was the vacant, open-mouthed look and in its place a Swanilda who might be a contemporary teen-ager. Her pouting and scorn were of the familiar mode, not some learned, ancient conceit.

And although no one in either cast brought any pathos to this ostensible comedy--it was played strictly as a sitcom--McKerrow’s fish-dive into Franz’s arms was a miracle of tenderness, the delicate unfurling of a flower in perfect, graded fluidity.

Danilo Radojevic, a relatively brash Peck’s bad boy of a Franz, complemented her and managed all his feats of derring-do with flying panache. Gil Boggs turned Dr. Coppelius into a Mr. Magoo who was suffering a bad case of Parkinson’s disease. With the constant shaking, he masked any trace of heartache the old man might have had--a poor stunt.

But there was another afternoon hero: conductor Charles Barker, who drew rounded, seamless phrases and sheer textures from his orchestra and made Delibes’ buttery waltzes irresistible.

At the evening performance, Marianna Tcherkassky gave an object lesson in how to invest dance steps with character clues. As one result, hers was a sexier Swanilda than McKerrow’s. She flirted with Franz (Wes Chapman) in their Act I pas de deux via swooning smiles delivered from renverse turns.

Terry Orr, the Dr. Coppelius, did not go in for the shakes, but still failed to exert a real presence--ominous, fearsome, bereft or anything else.