DANCE REVIEW : Frula Troupe Lively but a Bit Too Slick

On the patio outside Ambassador Auditorium, a couple of Frula musicians-turned-vendors manned a sale table filled with trinkets representing the arts and crafts of Eastern Europe.

A few minutes later, onstage, they picked up their instruments and accompanied the troupe’s 25 dancers in a program titled “Tzigane.”

That’s where the resemblance to Gypsy life, as strangers might perceive it, ended. Little that happened throughout Saturday evening could be distinguished from the repertory or style of many another ethnic company specializing in dances from Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Greece and Turkey.

Which is not to say that Frula, a company directed by Dragoslav Dzadzevic, lacks for professionalism. Indeed, the immensely attractive performers boast an abundance of grace and gusto, not to mention discipline.

When the product is so carefully packaged and routinized as this, however, it becomes mere spectacle, a thing of endless costume variety and perfectly choreographed unison maneuvers.

After all, Dzadzevic also produced a show called “Folklore on Ice.” It doesn’t seem likely that he might try a more adventurous route and really evoke the enforced itinerancy, persecution and hardship of a people expelled from one country after another and singled out by Stalin and Hitler for extermination.

One looked in vain for the encampment lifestyle or perhaps a strain of narrative suggesting Gypsy castoff status. But, no, everything was resolutely bright and cheery--an episode of generic heel-stomping, knee-slapping, whistling and squealing straight from the folk export marketplace.

An animated, Danny DeVito-sized Istvan Verebes, identified in the program book as “the world’s foremost Gypsy violinist,” led the musical contingent but was compromised by often harsh and distorting amplification.

The songs, with which many in the large, Slavic-speaking audience sang along, were inarguably authentic. So was the pleasure they elicited.