`CINDERELLA' REBORN AS WARTIME VALENTINE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Theater Critic

The ominous drone of a Messerschmitt airplane sweeps overhead. An air raid siren wails in the distance.

It's a little alarming to step into the eerily realistic aural environment Matthew Bourne has cooked up at the Ahmanson Theatre for his daring new production of ``Cinderella.'' Not that we've come to expect pixie dust and sugar plum fairies from the leader of Britain's racy Adventures in Motion Pictures.

As his dance company's name implies, Bourne is a child of American pop culture, who grew up watching Fred Astaire and John Wayne movies, not ``Giselle.'' His hip, fluidly cinematic sensibility was the driving force behind AMP's virtuosic, gender-switching ``Swan Lake,'' which had its North American premiere at the Ahmanson two years ago and introduced L.A. audiences to the erotic magnetism of dancer Adam Cooper.

Now Bourne, Cooper and AMP have returned with a reworking of ``Cinderella'' that's even more like a Broadway blockbuster than a traditional ballet. Viewed not as pure dance but as musical pantomime, or as a kind of colorized, live-action silent film, ``Cinderella'' sparkles with the same clever pop-art visuals, wry cultural observations and propulsive narrative drive that made ``Swan Lake'' such an unstuffy, high-concept pleasure.

What keeps ``Cinderella'' from attaining the level of a classic, apart from its tangled psychological-metaphysical conceits, is the dancing itself. Or rather, the absence of footwork sublime enough to match Bourne's truly inspired storytelling.

Using Prokofiev's astringent 1940s score, nimbly performed by a 28-piece orchestra under conductor Daryl Griffith, Bourne has transported the fable of the glass-slippered heroine to London during the Blitz, when Nazi bombers rained terror on the city's resilient populace for 10 ghastly months.

Royal Ballet dancer Sarah Wildor plays Cinderella as a frumpy homebody, who belongs to a monochromatic brood that would make the Addams Family look like the Cleavers. While father dozes in a wheelchair, Cinderella's drunken and possibly murderous stepmother (an amusingly over-the-top Isabel Mortimer) presides not only over jealous stepsisters but an incestuous stepbrother or two.

When a battered, disoriented Royal Air Force pilot (Cooper) stumbles in on a family gathering, Cinderella cleaves to him as a Hollywood hero incarnate, ready to fulfill her MGM fantasies.

With the help of a guardian angel (Will Kemp) who looks like a peroxided Noel Coward and moves with the cool angularity of an animated hieroglyphic, Cinderella and the Pilot (or perhaps her idealized version of him) slip off on a nightborne adventure. En route they pass through shell-shocked streets, to a bombed-out ballroom where macabre dancers are magically restored to life, to an Underground stop, a hospital mental ward and, finally, a train station platform where all will end a bit too sweetly and unambiguously, given the dark tone of Prokofiev's music, Bourne's scathingly comic vision of domestic life, and Lez Brotherston's sets, which have a skewed, expressionist look that briefly suggests the entire ballet could be occurring inside a mad girl's head.

Individually, the two leads are top-notch. Wildor has a magical moment dancing with a tailor's dummy, and Cooper, reversing his ``Swan Lake'' persona of sexual predator, evokes true pathos as the crippled pilot.

But while there's no doubting the erotic affinity between these real-life lovers, Bourne hasn't come up with a choreographic syntax that fully conveys their rapport, particularly in the bedroom duet. The limits of his modernist lexicon are more obvious here than they were in ``Swan Lake.''

``Cinderella'' is a valentine not only to the power of love under duress but to the transformative power of movies, and it buzzes with both sly and overt references to transcendent wartime fare like ``A Matter of Life and Death,'' ``Waterloo Bridge,'' ``Brief Encounter'' and ``On the Town.'' When the jewelled and gowned Wildor makes her nightclub entrance, it's as if Lillian Gish in ``Way Down East'' had been reborn as Ginger Rogers in ``Top Hat.''

That's almost as startling a makeover as the one Bourne has wrought with this high-flying, if not quite heavenly, ``Cinderella.''

THE FACTS

What: ``Cinderella.''

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Blvd.

When: Wednesday through May 23. Performances 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays. Additional performances 2 p.m. May 6, 13 and 20.

Tickets: $25 to $65. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three stars.

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Photo

Photo: Sarah Wildor and Adam Cooper play the principal roles in Matthew Bourne's daring new production of ``Cinderella.''