Miami ballet’s stylish efforts

An ambitious four-act extravaganza that lasts nearly as long as “Swan Lake,” Edward Villella’s “The Neighborhood Ballroom” proved clueless about storytelling and clumsy in its cavalcade of 20th century social dances at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts on Saturday. However, Villella always managed to get one thing right. Just one.

As an index of the prowess and vitality of Miami City Ballet -- the company that Villella founded in 1985 and has directed since -- the ballet did its job. Watching new company recruit Mikhail Ilyin make the “St. Louis Blues March” into a brilliant bravura feast, or longtime company stars Iliana Lopez and Franklin Gamero repeatedly turn choreographic fool’s gold into 24-carat showpieces, you knew you were in the right place. You could regret that only one ballerina danced in toe shoes and that the pointe excellence of the Miami women remained unexplored, but the performance of the company remained exemplary -- and needed to.

Repetitive and hopelessly muddled in the telling, the plot transposes the opera “Tales of Hoffmann” to an American nightclub in which a poet continually meets and loses flashy women. A shadowy nemesis (usually a chauffeur) hovers nearby, making sure that a character identified as “Muse” never distracts the poet -- or, for that matter, dances anything remotely memorable.

Meanwhile, the club setting provides opportunities for suites of social dances accompanied by Francisco Renno’s piano waltzes (played live) in Act 1, then recordings of Jazz Age dances (Act 2), 1940s swing (Act 3) and mambo hits (Act 4).

A different lost love becomes associated with each idiom, and they all return (with Ms. Muse) for a formal recap of the poet’s amours set to “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).”

Unfortunately, Villella neither left those social dances unmolested nor balleticized them with a coherent sense of style. So they kept lurching from one extreme to the other: Lindy Hop partnering stunts one second and then high-speed classical pirouettes the next, for instance. It didn’t work, not when we’ve seen Matthew Bourne’s “Cinderella” inventively transform dances of the 1940s into creative statements fusing narrative issues with familiar period dance-forms.

It may be bad dramaturgy, but when dancers cast in subsidiary roles -- or no roles whatsoever -- suddenly took over the ballet, you stopped looking at stock characters or pastiche choreography and began admiring the view. Luis Serrano more than once supplied cherishable intrusions of this sort and they alone embodied the Baudelaire quote about the need for intoxication that began the evening: “With wine, poetry, or with virtue, your choice. But intoxicate yourself.”

The nominal principals all struggled with featureless roles as well as the technical challenges of Villella’s jerry-built dances. Carlos Guerra couldn’t make the poet’s actions seem reasonable or even reckless but attended to his partnering duties manfully and occasionally demonstrated a buoyant jump.

As wicked Lily, Michelle Merell danced seduction cliches artfully and coped with some genuinely awful choreography involving a cape. As slinky Ava, Jennifer Kronenberg looked stylish even when upended in one of Villella’s more unfortunate lifts. As gutsy Rosalita, Lopez behaved as if she wasn’t in a ballet at all but at a cast party -- and it helped.

Best of all, perhaps: Mary Carmen Catoya as kinky Kiki, ringmaster of the Act 2 cross-dressing orgy and a dancer of unstoppable flair.