Showy ‘Giselle’ Hides Its Feelings

Great productions of classic plays, operas and ballets can take you deep within the imaginations of the works’ creators to freshen and enrich their original meanings. Ordinary stagings, however, merely illuminate the priorities and value systems of the production crew.

Earlier this year in Costa Mesa, “Le Corsaire” told us virtually nothing about Marius Petipa and the Imperial Russian Ballet--but much more than we might care to know about the current desperate-to-please regime at American Ballet Theatre.

Similarly, the 6-month-old San Francisco Ballet mounting of “Giselle” that opened at the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Wednesday offers only a wan transcription of a Parisian masterwork from 1841--but reveals plenty about how the company sets Bay Area audiences abuzz in 1999.

It is, most of all, not focused on love and death but the display of conspicuous wealth: what money can buy. As reworked by Helgi Tomasson and designed by Mikael Melbye, it scorns mere painted backdrops in favor of elaborate three-dimensional set units, with the doomed peasant heroine now residing in an upscale, two-story chalet and with the forest outside town moving so energetically under its own power that for a moment you think you’re watching the scene in “Macbeth” in which Birnam Wood marches to Dunsinane.

The emphasis on showing the money also extends to the very splashy, very unlikely fabrics and colors worn on the open road by the ducal hunting party and also to the upscale leather-boy jacket and codpiece adopted by the ill-fated gamekeeper Hilarion.

Besides looking floridly moneyed, this “Giselle” also looks coldly neoclassic--with the hyper-extended, technically updated style Tomasson danced at New York City Ballet replacing the more rounded and delicate Romanticism of 1841. Putting the stress on pure dance, he has cut storytelling music and added divertissement music--notably an authentic but long-deleted showpiece pas de deux for Giselle and Albrecht in Act 1--and so minimized the Wilis’ blood lust in Act 2 that you assume that this cadre of murderous dead virgins is really just some sort of professional corps de ballet bumped off en masse after the end of a long tour.

The production works hard to make an impression. It has an obvious splendor as well as plenty of refined dancing skill to divert an audience. But there’s virtually no emotional depth to savor, no sense of heartbreak--not at its premiere in April (reviewed previously) and not on Wednesday, when the leading roles fell to Tina LeBlanc, Roman Rykine and Lorena Feijoo.

LeBlanc danced Giselle immaculately, delivering the choreographic text with a detailed mastery that many a world-class exponent of the role would be hard-pressed to surpass. But expressive values stayed muted, generalized and small-scale. The Mad Scene proved merely a sad scene for this Pennsylvania ballerina: lots of wistful, poor-me suffering, no tragic stature, no sense of a love great enough to last beyond the grave.

A virtuoso from Ufa, Rykine brought a sharp Russian attack to Albrecht’s dancing but seemed to conceptualize the acting challenges as a series of bold, isolated effects: Making-the-Entrance, Touching-the-Grave, etc. And ultimately this Albrecht stayed far less focused on communing with the dead Giselle or staying alive till dawn than making sure his classical placement remained textbook-perfect.

LeBlanc and Rykine both capitalized on technical excellence, but nobody coupled bravura execution with dramatic authority more impressively than Feijoo as Myrta. Sister of Lorna F., who danced Giselle in the superb National Ballet of Cuba production at the Wiltern early in the year, she skimmed the stage magically enough to eclipse the moving scenery and worked effectively to sustain the dramatic dance-and-die tension in the last half of the ballet.

Peter Brandenhoff made it easier on her by playing Hilarion as a strong fighter, whether against a disguised nobleman in Act 1 or a supernatural death sentence in Act 2. Effective--and just rough enough to suit the image dictated by his costume.

Tomasson’s flashy pas de cinq in Act 1 boasted some of the company’s most winning technicians, notably Guennadi Nedviguine and Christopher Stowell, with the interpolated woman’s solo suavely executed by Kristin Long (scheduled to dance the role of Giselle on Saturday afternoon). Claudia Alfieri and Vanessa Zahorian mirrored one another expertly in the duet passages.

Compromised by problematic costuming, the principal mime duties fell to Julia Adam (Bathilde), Katita Waldo (Berthe), Michael Eaton (Wilfred) and Val Caniparoli (the Duke). Occasionally enforcing strangely fluctuating tempos, Emil De Cou conducted members of the Pacific Symphony in very familiar scores by Adam and Burgmuller along with his new arrangements and orchestrations of less familiar music by them.

* San Francisco Ballet dances “Giselle,” with alternating principals, tonight at 8, Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $10-$68. (714) 556-ARTS.