It’s a matter of principals

STAR power has always been central to the image and excitement of the Bolshoi Ballet. It was the reason that so many of us eagerly returned, tour after tour, to some of the most wretched choreography of the 20th century. And just five years ago -- at a low ebb in the company’s international reputation -- it was the reason that American impresarios signed famed ballerina Nina Ananiashvili to dance the opening night of every ballet in every Bolshoi tour city.

But nearly all the Bolshoi’s stars are missing from the roster at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, where the company opened a six-day engagement Tuesday. And for that loss you can blame not only illness and injury but also the vacuum created by the company’s continual switch in artistic directors: on average, a different one every two years during the last decade.

The administrative instability that’s become the Bolshoi status quo has given star dancers exceptional clout, and too many of them reportedly don’t deign to dance the full repertory -- not recent novelties such as “The Bright Stream” (seen Tuesday), not even renowned staples of the Soviet era such as “Spartacus” (which opens Friday). And without its stars, the Bolshoi isn’t even the most exciting company in Moscow, much less anyplace else.

Happily, the dancing in “The Bright Stream” stays far above the mediocre level of the Bolshoi “La Bayadere” at OCPAC three years ago -- maybe because Alexei Ratmansky, the company’s latest artistic director, has adroitly adjusted his choreography to the capabilities of the available principals. Or because his style -- a mix of parody, character dance and balleticized folklore -- isn’t nearly as technically exposed.

Indeed, Ratmansky’s two-act dance comedy about romance on a collective farm is nothing if not adroit, allowing those who want to feel nostalgic about communism to indulge themselves but also quietly invoking some of the nastiest memories of that system.

The original version of “The Bright Stream” was choreographed by Fyodor Lopukhov in 1935 and immediately ran afoul of the ongoing official campaign against its composer, Dmitri Shostakovich. The ballet was banned, Lopukhov lost his job and the co-author of the scenario was sent to his death in one of Josef Stalin’s infamous gulags.

Ratmansky’s 2003 remake keeps the plot and score and manages to include one of Stalin’s put-downs of Shostakovich on the banner-laden curtain we see at the beginning of Act 1. Like the relentlessly cheery music, Ratmansky’s choreography and the over-the-top abundance depicted in Boris Messerer’s sets give the production the cartoonish naivete of an antique propaganda ballet -- though if you know your Russian history, you know that Stalin’s collective farms produced starvation more often than abundance.

Act 1 is all about collective celebration, Act 2 amorous intrigues that defeat would-be seducers. Very quickly, two nameless ballet dancers visiting the farm become of major interest, eventually switching roles and dancing in each other’s styles. Maria Alexandrova has always had a spectacular jump; she not only shows it off again here but also gets to don her partner’s clothes in Act 2 and re-dance the solo we saw him perform earlier. She is scintillating, maybe not yet a star in presence but certainly one in mastery.

Meanwhile, Yan Godovsky camps in tulle dressed as La Sylphide and expertly mimics Alexandrova’s jumps -- though, like too many dancers in “The Bright Stream,” he is supposed to fumble through steps to make us laugh. British choreographer Matthew Bourne makes bad dancing infinitely funnier, but Godovsky gets through his drag act with honor.

The most serious choreography goes to Anastasia Yatsenko and Yury Klevtsov as Zina and Pyotr (the latter to be danced tonight by Vladimir Neporozhny), a married couple rediscovering their love during a masquerade in which he believes he’s wooing another woman. Their Act 2 pas de deux ends just as it begins to fully display the dancers’ lyric/dramatic suavity, but it does give the ballet a dollop of emotional depth and suggests that Ratmansky is capable of more than overextended Ballets Trockadero-style lampooning and stale character burlesque.

Conductor Pavel Sorokin and the Bolshoi Orchestra convincingly rehabilitate the once-despised Shostakovich score, and a whole slew of dancers -- Alexei Loparevich, Irina Zibrova, Alexander Petukhov, Anna Antropova, Gennady Yanin, Ksenia Pchelkina and Egor Simachev -- contribute their skill and energy in flashy subsidiary roles. But the Bolshoi wouldn’t be the Bolshoi if this innocuous exercise was typical of its vision and artistic resources. Something essential is missing -- and it starts at the top.

*

Bolshoi Ballet

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: 8 tonight, “The Bright Stream”; 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8

p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, “Spartacus”

Price: $25 to $110

Info: (714) 556-2787 or www.ocpac.org