MUSIC / DANCE REVIEW : Ballet Stumbles--and Bumbles--at the Bowl

wasn’t exactly business as usual this weekend for the conspicuous picnickers at the Hollywood Bowl. Welcome to the not-so-wonderful world of video.

Although no thinking person has ever regarded the cramped orchestra shell in the vast amphitheater as a proper place for dancing, the dauntless stellar attraction for this event was the flying firebrand Julio Bocca.

He turned out to be the first major ballet star to attempt to conquer these wide open spaces since Fernando Bujones leaped the boards amid the fiddlers in 1986.

Recognizing the obvious visual problems, Bowl authorities decided to install a 15 x 20-foot screen on either side of the shell to magnify the tippy-toe action for the folks far away. The novel concept seemed reasonable enough. The execution, however, proved infuriatingly inept.

They do this sort of thing much better at Dodger Stadium. These days, it probably is the only thing they do better at Dodger Stadium.

On Diamondvision, the crowd can enjoy the added advantage of instant replay. And in baseball, the audience and the technicians all understand the game. There might be something of an uproar if the cameras dwelled on an idle outfielder scratching his nose while the heroic catcher blocked a climactic run at home plate. In Bowlovision, no one seemed to know, or care, where the action was.

Saturday night, John Mauceri, the irreverent and ever-charming maestro, told the viewers to watch for Odile’s 32 infamous fouettes in the Black Swan pas de deux. When the great moment came for whipped turns, the screens revealed only the ballerina’s passive partner.

That created just one of many visual confusions. The first and least came with the flashing of a fancy “H.B.O.” logo that identified something or other as a prelude to the festivities. Contrary to popular speculation, the initials seemed to represent the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, not Home Box Office.

When the incessantly restless, ridiculously fussy cameras got to work, they kept amputating the dancers at the thigh and/or elbow, kept watching the choreography from the wrong angle, kept focusing on irrelevant detail.

The kitsch-lighting scheme succeeded on making the shell glow in blushing shades of red and purple like some delirious, Gargantuan jukebox. This, alas, reduced the images on the screens to vague movement in a dim mud pit. Matters were hardly helped in the “Swan Lake” excerpt when the dancers’ black costumes melted into the black tuxedos of the orchestra players who served as background scenery.

Because the costly newfangled technology was in place anyway, our bowling impresarios decided to use it for the regular symphonic portions of the program, not just for the misplaced ballet. The frantic, apparently improvised results proved just as frustrating here. Loving close-ups of a noodling second-violinist illustrated a momentous brass entrance. An irrelevant piccolo monopolized the image during a sweeping string melody. The all-important conductor was treated like a bit player.

And so it went. Onward and downward. For those with a decent view of the stage, the video offered nervous distraction. For those without a good view, the video offered constant distortion. There must be a better way.

What’s that? You want to know about the dancing and the music?

Oh, dear. Under the circumstances, it was hard to pay attention to little things.

The fast, flamboyant and chronically impetuous Bocca brought his own partner, Eleanora Cassano of the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. She mustered reasonable bravura for a pallid Black Swan--as well as some shaky, itinerant fouettes--and sweet, generalized lyricism as Juliet in a Balcony Scene of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Romeo” bereft of balcony. Accurate assessment of her technique and her personality will have to await a more auspicious occasion.

After intermission, four other dancers (Mauceri called them all “great”) ventured half of “Who Cares?” (1970), George Balanchine’s ode to George Gershwin. Judith Fugate brought authentic New York City Ballet manners to her arching solos. Her two colleagues demonstrated an interesting stylistic contrast, the glittery Cynthia Harvey of American Ballet Theatre stressing traditional finesse, the earthy Evelyn Cisneros of San Francisco seeming more neo than classical . Anthony Randazzo made much of the elegant funk assigned to the all-purpose cavalier.

The orchestral contributions, very nicely played and very resonantly amplified, began with a hum-along Tchaikovsky suite stitched by Mauceri from “The Nutcracker” and “The Sleeping Beauty.” The “Swan Lake” finale served as an unscheduled bonus in the lengthy program, preceded by a whimsical bit of narrative misinformation (contrary to the apologia, the ballet does not end underwater).

Mauceri and his responsive band had fun with the dark tensions of Prokofiev’s “Cinderella.” They underscored the delicate ardor of “Romeo and Juliet” so persuasively that one actually wanted to believe the conductor’s introductory assertion that the ballet was created in Leningrad in 1940. (Anyone for Brno, 1938?)

After intermission--and after a preview of a rousing post-riot-banality video featuring the Bowl Orchestra and a cast of thousands--Mauceri turned to the infernal repetitions of John Adams’ “The Chairman Dances.” Following 12 pesky minutes of minimalist chugging, the Gershwin songs sounded irresistibly sweet and lazy.

Official head counts: 10,267 on Friday; 12,103 on Saturday. Not bad for ballet. Not good for a 17,800-seat showplace that sells out at the first hint of a symphonic firecracker.

The statistics for the Sunday-night repetition were not available at press time. That performance, incidentally, was scheduled to begin at 7:30, an hour when lingering sunlight might wreak additional havoc with the video projections.