A Midsummer Night's Dream.

"A Forest near Athens, one Midsummer Eve," says the program for Pacific Northwest Ballet's new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which closed the company's twenty-fourth season at the Seattle Opera House. That is, of course, the setting for Shakespeare's play as well as of George Balanchine's ballet. The dance is now dressed up in a sparkling new package of sets and costumes, the first such revision of an evening-length production authorized by the Balanchine Trust.

It would have been more accurate to say "A Forest near Snoqualmie," for when the leaf-strewn curtain goes up on designer Martin Pakledinaz's forest, the ballet is placed squarely in the middle of the Pacific Northwest, with a few twists. For this forest is damp and dark, filled with frogs and spiders, mushrooms and a snail shell for Titania's repose. An arch of highly improbable pink cabbage roses frames the scene; the leaves are chewed by aphids in one or two spots, as they would be in a Seattle garden.

This set, as well as the Act II decor, is very different from the one designed by David Hays in 1962 for the New York City Ballet. For Act I Pakledinaz creates an environment with which the local audience can immediately identify; for Act II he creates a space for dancing. The pavilion of the original is eliminated and the stage is framed by Greek-style pillars, their capitals echoing the design of Hippolyta's headdress in Act I.

This affords the dancers a much bigger space in which to display Balanchine's precise, decorous, and geometrically inventive choreography for the wedding scene and the extended lyrical pas de deux that forms the centerpiece of this act.

Pakledinaz is best known for his costume design, so it is ironic that his sets for this production are more aesthetically pleasing than the costumes, at least for Act I. A palette featuring acid green, orange, and violet for the bugs jars the eye, although Oberon's dark, sparkling cloak and Titania's pale pink gown and cloak make magic. The costumes for Act II are much more pleasing. The tutus look Elizabethan, the salmon color for the corps continuing the Pacific Northwest ethos in a subtle fashion.

PNB artistic director Francia Russell, who has been staging Balanchine's work all over the world for more than three decades, understands it well. She would never tamper with his vision as she remembers it. But with this production of Dream, so different from the old one, she has, in some ways, succeeded with a more accurate realization of the choreographer's original intentions for this essay in nostalgia for his lost Russian childhood and his view of the relationship between the sexes. And 6y adding an apotheosis with lighting effects that was not part of the original production, Russell makes reference to the religious beliefs that infused much of Balanchine's later work.

Step by step, gesture by gesture, phrase by phrase, the movement and mime are set just as Balanchine created them, but somehow, by changing the sets and costumes, Russell has succeeded in allowing the dancers to loosen up, to take chances, and to perform far more freely than I've ever seen them, especially on opening night.

As Titania, Patricia Barker was soft and yielding. She was an enchanted and enchanting Queen of the Fairies in her pas de deux with a remarkably feline Bottom, danced by Brad Phillips. Seth Belliston, as Puck, mimed and danced with electrifying clarity. The children from the school, as bugs and little fairies, had a good time displaying their excellent training. And Ariana Lallone, as Hippolyta, was aggressive, precise, and monumental -- a dancer to reckon with, who made her debut in this ballet years ago -- as a bug!

In a forest near Snoqualmie ... there is ballet and magic!