New Casts, Focus for S.F. Troupe

The San Francisco Ballet has a lot to show. The question is: Does Orange County want to see it?

Wednesday night, Helgi Tomasson’s elegant, energetic and eminently versatile company offered its second performance of three short ballets billed as “Repertory Highlights.” The Performing Arts Center yawned with empty seats. It was sad. It was embarrassing.

The message seems clear. If it isn’t “Nutcracker,” it isn’t compelling. Civilization must be in trouble.

Ironically, shades of the popular sugar-plum ballet haunted the revival of Balanchine’s highly sophisticated “Ballo della Regina,” which opened the program. Make that flakes of the sugar-plum ballet. While Elizabeth Loscavio, Mikko Nissinen and the sprightly women of the corps executed Balanchine’s neoclassical convolutions, bits of artificial snow, left over from Tchaikovsky’s perpetual-Christmas celebration, floated down from the stage sky. It seemed a significant omen.

Although the works on the agenda were familiar, the casting was not. New dancers brought new nuances to their hand-me-down assignments. Tomasson obviously encourages individuality in his ensemble, and he commands a roster of remarkable depth.

Most striking among the shifting principals was Loscavio. On Tuesday she had danced Tomasson’s “Sonata” with sweeping, assertive poignancy. On Wednesday she turned to Balanchine and translated romantic indulgence into neoclassical glitter. She was dazzling, fleet in bravura tests, inevitably crisp in articulation, grandly joyous in manner. And she made it all seem natural, even easy.

Nissinen complemented his ballerina with much noble sympathy, modest elevation and muted virtuosity. Remembering, perhaps, that Balanchine thought ballet was primarily the domain of the woman, the Finnish danseur remained steadfastly self-effacing. In context, the virtue threatened to seem dubious.

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In “Sonata,” Tomasson’s ode to anguished loss, alienation, thwarted love and Rachmaninoff gush, the lovers were portrayed for the first time by Joanna Berman and Anthony Randazzo. She swooned and swooped with sweet innocence and gratifying precision. He served as reliable porteur and hard-working firebrand. Little passion illuminated their partnership, however, and one missed the brooding intensity mustered the night before by Loscavio and her transplanted Bolshoi prince, Yuri Posokhov.

David Palmer, a commanding old friend from the Joffrey, returned as one of the twin forces of opposition. His quiet menace was nicely counterbalanced here by the febrile Eric Hoisington. At the previous performance, Palmer had shared abstract nemesis duties with the impish Christopher Stowell.

The evening ended, amid tumultuous cheers from the scrawny audience, with James Kudelka’s “Terra Firma,” a nervous and trendy little exercise in perpetual mechanical motion. The corps strutted to Michael Torke’s noodle-doodle score with more jazzy abandon than precision, but Evelyn Cisneros and Jais Zinoun did some nifty slinking and bobbing in their first outing with the central pas de deux.

Sartorial postscript: The women in this repetitive extravaganza wear oddly high-bodiced skirts, not shorts as previously misreported. Sorry about that.

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The San Francisco Ballet concludes its engagement at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, with performances of “The Nutcracker” tonight at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m.. $18-$55. (714) 556-2787.