A fine Balanchine, then a shallow ‘Blues’

For the last 35 years, Dance Theatre of Harlem has performed brain-dead pop showpieces with the same technical power and stylistic authority as classics of the international repertory.

Indeed, the company’s knack for making balletic junk food almost as palatable as haute cuisine has shaped its artistic identity. Happily, that skill remained potent Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

After a typically pristine performance of George Balanchine’s neoclassic “Serenade” -- one particularly notable for corps refinement -- the company introduced “St. Louis Woman: A Blues Ballet,” an unrelievedly shallow hourlong dance-drama based on the 1946 Broadway musical by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.

The songs from that show, along with the other Arlen-Mercer standards roped into this project, might have yielded something edgy and distinctive in the hands of a choreographer with genuine storytelling skills: Matthew Bourne, certainly, and maybe Susan Marshall or Donald Byrd.

But Michael Smuin told the story crudely (at one point resorting to illuminated signs to convey plot points), concentrating on unloading one showpiece cliche after another.

Even the menacing character of Death couldn’t keep the result from being all surface -- nothing but an excuse to get dressed up in Willa Kim’s colorfully slashed and appliqued ‘40s costumes and relentlessly execute bravura steps that Smuin didn’t invent and couldn’t deploy to convey character or emotion.

Everyone here got at least one competition-style pas de deux -- even Death (to “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive”).

However, the duets proved largely interchangeable, and any semblance of feeling in this tale of love and murder at a racetrack nightclub came from the faces the dancers made while they performed, not from the movement itself.

Contrary to “Blues in the Night,” the first song heard after the curtain rose, the “two-face” and “worrisome thing” on view turned out to be no woman but rather the commanding Donald Williams as Biglow Brown: gangster, club owner and betrayer of lyrical Lila, a ditsy role that even Tai Jimenez couldn’t make interesting.

Brown’s downfall came at the hands of Caroline Rocher as Della Green, born irresistibly slinky but far more attracted to the fabulous jumps and turns of Ikolo Griffin’s Li’l Augie than anything Brown could offer.

Along the way, major duets occurred for Melissa Morrissey and Preston Dugger, for Christiane Cristo-Ezewoko and Iyun Harrison and (as Death and his acolyte) for Antonio Douthit and Alicia Graf. And everyone filled Tony Walton’s splashy sets with such energy and sheer love of dancing that it didn’t matter that “St. Louis Woman” offered hopelessly stale, predictable, passionless choreography. It offered Dance Theatre of Harlem, and that was enough.

If the company danced Smuin as if he were Balanchine, the cast of “Serenade” danced Balanchine as if he were God -- with reverence and devotion. Graf as the Dark Angel and Sonny Robinson as her enigmatic consort gave the finest individual performances.

However, Lenore Pavlakos grew impressively from her rather prosaic partnership with Kip Sturm in the waltz to the sense of tragic loss that the choreography and Tchaikovsky’s score eventually evoked.

Eve Lawson’s staging of passages for the women’s corps sometimes seemed excessively clipped, as if she wanted you to see the structural skeleton of the choreography but not fall under its spell. Fat chance with this spellbinding sisterhood.

Joseph E. Fields conducted both ballets appreciatively, and singers Lenora Zenzalai Helm, Marlon Saunders and Talise Trevigne lent their artistry to “St. Louis Woman,” although muddled amplification sometimes compromised the result.