DANCE REVIEW : ‘Cradle of Fire’ a Tough Sell

When not stricken with a social conscience and a zeal for taking on humankind’s monstrous atrocities, Zina Bethune can turn out perfectly palatable entertainment.

One look at her credits--on Broadway and television, as a ballet dancer and actor--explains the ongoing series of multimedia extravaganzas she produces in the name of “new art.”

Sure enough, the Bethune Theatredanse, newly named resident company at the L.A. Theatre Center, supplied all the customary components Friday for its premiere of “Cradle of Fire.”

There was David S. Kates’ recorded score, an ambitious thing brimming with tuneful lyricism, triumphant fanfares and children’s choruses that sounded like a Hollywood cross between “Annie” and “Fiddler on the Roof”--with some of the melodies actually composed by Holocaust victims.

There was Bethune’s and Carlos Jones’ script--connective lines that might have been lifted from a banal TV drama--interposed between set pieces and dance numbers (a la “West Side Story”) that reveled in high-power turns and leaps.

The trouble with all this Disney-fication is that it turns the unspeakable into bathos. One cannot watch footage of death-camp horror (those skeletal bodies being thrown like denuded twigs into pits) amid a sugar-coated environment. Even when the duet between mother and daughter inmates takes on an expression of angst, something says “No.”

Nor can the tragedy of our gang-ridden urban streets be juxtaposed neatly with the effects of systematic, government-sponsored genocide. The two are of a different order.

So, when the final tableau strikes a balance between the camp mother and the inner-city mother--surrounded by their respective dead children--the whole issue gets reduced to theatrical production, a turf where angels, understandably, should fear to tread.