Miscast heroics

SET to a relentlessly bombastic score by Aram Khachaturian, the 1968 Yuri Grigorovich dance drama “Spartacus” was always muscle-bound Soviet kitsch. But back when the Bolshoi Ballet was a great company, this three-hour depiction of a Roman slave revolt could be cast with Russia’s most passionate and heroic dancing actors. Moreover, the company as a whole gave it unstinting body-and-soul commitment. As a result, “Spartacus” became one of the ballet world’s greatest guilty pleasures.

Don’t take my word for it. There are several home video editions that prove exactly what the Bolshoi brought to “Spartacus” in its glory days -- and exactly what was missing Saturday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Grigorovich alternated grandiose narrative sequences with solos exploring the emotions of the four major characters. Unfortunately, the group passages most often displayed only empty drill-team efficiency Saturday: hordes of soldiers endlessly stabbing the air to counts. Worse, the solos functioned as exposes, highlighting the technical and expressive limitations of the evening’s principals.

A few moments did supply glints of full-scale old Bolshoi virtuosity and spirit: the Roman legions surrounding Spartacus’ men in Act 3, for example, or Andrei Bolotin, Denis Medvedev and Andrei Evdokimov as cane-wielding shepherds in Act 2.

Otherwise, this “Spartacus” proved far inferior in attack and feeling to the abridged version danced in Thousand Oaks three years ago by the choreographer’s own Moscow Grigorovich Ballet (a.k.a. the Grigorovich Ballet of the Russian Federation Ballet).

Conducted by Pavel Sorokin, the members of the Bolshoi Orchestra became the true superheroes in Costa Mesa, setting a standard of unanimity and larger-than-life passion that the dancing only fitfully matched.

Light on his feet and elegant in his bearing, Alexander Volchkov served as an index to Bolshoi miscasting. Assigned the role of the evil Roman general Crassus, he worked energetically to make the character dangerously neurotic, but he lacked weight, authority and technical security in so many solo and partnering challenges that he ended up about as threatening as a sullen frat boy at a toga party.

As Aegina, his counterpart in tyranny, Maria Allash camouflaged her technical lapses with greater success and made her mock-seductive pole dance in the last act -- flashy contortions and cornball eroticism mixed with queen bee hauteur -- into the solo highpoint of the evening. Selling trash choreography is an art in itself and Allash turned even the ballet’s infamous crotch lift to her advantage.

Most sources, including the Orange County center’s program booklet, list the suffering heroine of “Spartacus” as Phrygia. The cast insert sheet, however, used “Frigia,” and that spelling inadvertently provided a key to the emotional frigidity of Anna Antonicheva in the role. She brought beautiful proportions, lyrical phrasing and classical finesse to her dancing: everything that can be taught, but nothing that can be felt. Frigia indeed.

In the title role, Yuri Klevtsov worked harder than anyone else on the stage, seeking to realize the fearsome demands of choreography that have become a touchstone of Bolshoi male artistry. But his full-out intensity didn’t make exciting or inspiring all his disappointingly low split-jumps and other effortful, compromised bravura. You respected his attempt to dance beyond his comfort zone but wondered again why the company had staged a ballet it couldn’t cast.

When the Bolshoi revives works like “Spartacus” that used to define its place in the classical pantheon, some critics like to attribute the evident insufficiency to the lack of heroic/charismatic dancing-actors on 21st-century stages -- they broke the mold, etc. But you don’t hear that kind of excuse when the Boris Eifman company, the Hamburg Ballet or the Cubans come around.

If the Bolshoi Ballet looked awfully inconsequential this week in the most starless engagement it has ever danced in Southern California, don’t blame the classical zeitgeist. Blame the company’s curious lack of vision and self-awareness, starting with its inability to see just what it has to offer in 2005 -- and what it hasn’t.