Dancing the Role Tonight Will Be...

“Dvorovenko, Belotserkovsky, Reyes, Corella....”

To the general reader, the words at the bottom of the Sunday Calendar ad for the upcoming American Ballet Theatre “Nutcracker” may read like a secret code. But don’t call the FBI. As any balletomane can tell you, the list announces the first of no less than 12 casting combinations scheduled during the company’s Dec. 14-23 engagement at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

Cast changes are worth announcing because true balletomanes would never want to see just “The Nutcracker” or just the American Ballet Theatre “Nutcracker,” but rather a particular lineup of stars in this familiar production. And if they can’t find their beloved Angel Corella and Paloma Herrera dancing together--and this season they can’t--they’re likely to go more than once to check out how their favorites fare with other partners.

For company directors, however, audience favoritism isn’t the issue; instead, cast changes are a practical solution to a bottom-line scheduling difficulty: Major concert dancers just don’t do eight performances a week.Dancers in Broadway musicals, nightclubs and rock shows may be considered the workhorses of the trade, exemplary for their strength, stamina and reliability every night. But concert dancers--especially those who are ballet trained--arguably represent the thoroughbreds of the profession, and most of them insist on a lighter schedule to produce peak results. Enter the practice of alternating dancers throughout a run.

But far from being a necessary evil in concert dance, cast changes allow the audience to take the measure of a work and of a company by seeing what different artists contribute.

Not only does fine choreography grow deeper in the process, but even bad choreography grows more interesting--if only because new performers shift attention from creative to interpretive issues.

In other words, the second time around, you watch Them, not It. And this protective mental mechanism makes it possible to revisit such full-evening abominations as Ben Stevenson’s “Cinderella” or the corrupt American Ballet Theatre edition of “Le Corsaire” with positive expectations.

Moreover, a menu of cast changes allows the audience the kind of choice that seldom exists in other forms of live entertainment: the ability to select a cast strictly from personal tastes. Your Romeo, your Juliet.

Everyone’s taste, of course, will be as different as the dancers on view, so your chosen few might include the darling of Vanity Fair this season, the ballerina who most embodies your lifelong vision of classical purity, the car man in “The Car Man” that you’d most like to get alone in a convertible, or that living legend who was fabulous when you were young and still has that je ne sais quoi (if nothing else).

Moreover, the standard show business assumption that there’s just one “ideal” cast simply doesn’t hold up in the dance world, because the shortness of careers means that many dancers reach their greatest fame when they’re past their prime. So if you’ve waited too long to see the diva of the 1980s, you might well find her less exciting at the gala opening than that unheralded young artist going for broke at the matinee.

And, sometimes, as the good book tells us, the first shall be last, and the choreographer’s own ideal cast ends up dancing at the matinee because of commercial considerations.

In 1965, for instance, Kenneth MacMillan choreographed his full-length “Romeo and Juliet” for Christopher Gable and Lynn Seymour, then promising young artists of England’s Royal Ballet but not stars. Company management, however, declared that it would be too risky a box-office proposition to let Gable and Seymour dance at the premiere or on the opening nights of touring engagements. Those occasions went to Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn--not exactly chopped liver, of course, but utterly different in style from the more intimate, contemporary approach that MacMillan intended.With four dancers listed for each role (and not just the leads), Matthew Bourne’s character-driven dance drama “The Car Man” (running through Oct. 28 at the Ahmanson Theatre) provides an object lesson in the compare-and-contrast pleasures of seeing the same choreography differently when new artists put their signatures on a work.

In basic outline, “The Car Man” is, of course, “Carmen,” adapted, re-sexed and resituated in a mid-American small town of the 1960s. The seduced and betrayed Don Jose has become the mistreated Angelo, and the irresistible Carmen has morphed into a bisexual male drifter named Luca.

On opening night, Alan Vincent made a memorably cynical, been-there-done-that Luca, but at other performances, he’s no less impressive in the subsidiary role of the brutal prison warden. On those occasions, he also dances in the garage-worker corps and in Bourne’s endearing Martha Graham parody. That’s about as much total work as playing Luca and definitely not comparable to the way principal dancers are coddled in the hierarchal ballet world. Secondary dancers often move up to leading roles, but you’d never find a ballet star dancing in the corps on an off night.

Bourne’s whole approach to cast changes seems to reflect an older theatrical tradition than the scheduling practices of modern concert dance.

Back in the heyday of the Shakespearean actor-manager, for instance, star actors Henry Irving and Edwin Booth alternated as Othello and Iago in 1881. Repertory casting of this sort kept actors fresh, companies challenged and audiences intrigued.

Similarly, at the Ahmanson, Ewan Wardrop has played a hot, hair-trigger Luca to Will Kemp’s deeply sensitive Angelo and then traded roles with him, working against physical type--the hunky, commanding Wardrop trying for vulnerability as Angelo and the slender, boyish Kemp trying for drop-dead machismo as Luca.

The stretch can be fascinating even when the results aren’t preferable to more typecast performances. Kemp, in particular, rethinks every one of Luca’s actions and motivations so they fit him. Unlike the others in the role, he makes some of the character’s bravado a sham and prioritizes control of other people rather than mere animal release in the sex duets. After the murder that ends Act 1, his Luca darkens, so that even the barhopping diversions of Act 2 reveal a pent-up tension that fully explodes in his drunken fury in the final scene.

This Luca may not be able to physically intimidate the garage corps a la Vincent or take the rough-sex duet in one overpowering Brando-as-Kowalski assault a la Wardrop. But three months with a Hollywood weight-trainer and he’d own the role. Still, it wouldn’t be worth it, because then he’d be too pumped up to play Angelo, which is exactly Wardrop’s problem.

Not every cast change is made in heaven or even planned.

Like those in opera and on Broadway, the most startling ones in the dance world are those that are announced by a voice in the dark and make you wish that you’d completely repaid your karmic debt before arriving at the theater:

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to American Ballet Torture. In tonight’s performance, the role created for Desiree Etoile will, because of her [choose one] illness/injury/weeklong bender/new exorbitant salary demands, be assumed, on short notice, for the first time in any theater or rehearsal hall, by Ina Klutz of the Baden-Baden Ballet. And may God have mercy on our souls.”

On such occasions, only the pure of heart in the audience will be able to remember that each dance artist worthy of the name is a unique mosaic of energy, intelligence, technique, expression, musicality, experience and an inimitable way of moving. The rest of us--impure and disgruntled--will only pray for the drinks at intermission to be strong and plentiful.