DANCE REVIEW : A Dewy Juliet in a Dusty ‘Romeo’

Beleaguered and bedraggled, the Kirov (a.k.a. Maryinsky) Ballet of St. Petersburg repeated its dated and dutiful “Romeo and Juliet” Wednesday night at the Performing Arts Center.

Pyotr Williams’ 1940 decors still resembled faded antique patchwork. Oleg Vinogradov’s uncredited, somewhat truncated revision of Leonid Lavrovsky’s original staging scheme suffered once again from dramatic obfuscation and melodramatic excess. Ensemble values remained ragged.

Miracles cannot happen overnight, even in Orange County.

Nonetheless, the viewer could be grateful for at least one big favor: a lovely ballerina named Larissa Lezhnina, who took over the role of Juliet.

She may not yet possess the self-assured grandeur of Altynai Assylmuratova, her rightfully adulated, slightly chilly predecessor. But she lays her own claim to the role with an irresistible juxtaposition of girlish impetuosity and womanly ardor.

A product of the vaunted Vaganova Academy, Lezhnina had just risen from the ranks of the Kirov corps when the company visited North America in 1989. The management awarded her the title role in its televised “Sleeping Beauty,” but an injury kept her out of the spotlight for most of the subsequent tour. The loss, clearly, was ours.

Slender, fair, perfectly proportioned and the mistress of a noble line, Lezhnina is instantly radiant. She can make the most complex maneuver seem casual and, perhaps more important in this context, she can inflect the most heroic gesture with subtle meaning. She acts with her long and supple body, dances with her huge brown eyes.

Her Juliet is convincingly playful with the Nurse, instinctively tender with Romeo even at the first fleeting encounter, sadly passionate in her embrace of a tragic destiny. One would love to see her in a production that affords the heroine better delineated opportunities for character development.

One also would love to see her in a production that better focuses the strengths of Lavrovsky’s original concept. Vinogradov seems to give his ballerinas little expansive freedom, for instance, in the fearless dash that should propel Juliet to and from her fateful meeting with Friar Laurence. Like Assylmuratova the night before, Lezhnina raised her chin, flung back her cape and executed a modest series of bourrees that suggested dainty urgency rather than wildly desperate abandon. Something has gotten lost in translation.

Despite a few superficial evasions, however, her performance used canny strength to convey pathetic vulnerability. Lezhnina’s promise is staggering. It will be fascinating to observe her progress.

Alexander Gulayev, her attentive Romeo, came to the Kirov in 1990 via the distinguished Perm Ballet. Shy, youthful and somewhat frail in appearance, he partnered Lezhnina with sweet deference, executed his relatively modest solos with neat bravado and struck the right theatrical poses. He was always tasteful, always sympathetic and sometimes a bit bland.

Gennadi Babanin enjoyed a promotion on this occasion from the eye-popping duties of the Duke of Verona to the flamboyant acrobatics of Tybalt. He conveyed the nobleman’s sadistic glee with taut precision, entered the sword fights with obvious zest and tried with reasonable success not to look too silly in his crazy-quilt costume.

Otherwise we had Kirov “Romeo” business essentially as usual. The character dances looked listless, the narrative omissions continued to perplex, and the corps still found it impossible to clap on the beat during the folksy rituals.

It should be noted, however, that Sergei Vikharev, the agreeably playful Mercutio, omitted the final terminal twitch that had elicited laughter on Tuesday. There may be hope.