Coppelia.

REVIEWED BY CAMILLE HARDY

Sometimes the choreography of Maguy Marin is too cool--intellectual, cerebral--and at others, too warm--glib slick. But the American premiere of her Coppelia, a kick-off event for Lincoln Center Festival 96, was "just right," as Goldilocks would pronounce. A multimedia production that blends film with live action onstage, Marin's 1993 Coppelia is not a send-up of Arthur Saint-Leon's 1870 classic, which took its libretto from one of the soles of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Her two-act ballet is a witty reinterpretation of a love triangle, with contemporary ideals and consequences that could only evolve at the end of the twentieth century. The third act, with blessings by figurer beings and happily-ever-after duets, is gone. What remains from the original is a young man's yearning both for his fiancee and for an idealized woman, along with two acts of Leo Delibes's beautiful score, played by members of the New York City Opera Orchestra conducted by Laurent Pillot.

During the tuneful overture the curtain rises to reveal a large movie screen flanked by two high-rise buildings that are part of a housing project with angular concrete balconies. Dr. Coppelius, here an inventor of photographic images, walks home alternately across the stage and on film, setting up Marin's twin planes of reality for this urban fairy tale with hardly a trace of cynicism. In Act 1, the stage is an exterior courtyard where Swanilda (Fransoise Joullie) and Franz (Josu Zabala) wow each other and schmooze with friends in a series of physical games and dance sequences that display some of the tanginess of Jerome Robbins's West Side Story choreography, European folk dances, and disco.

Coppelia appears on the balcony above. Not a mechanical doll but a projected celluloid image, this sexy blonde wears a red suit and munches a big, tempting apple. Franz is smitten.

Swanilda takes matters into her own hands and plans to enter the apartment above. In Act II, the stage is the interior of Dr. Coppelius's apartment, and the film screen lets the audience look down from the balcony into the courtyard. Like her nineteenth-century counterpart, Swanilda finds her rival's clothing and dresses up in it, donning a red suit, a blonde wig, and high heels. A jittery striptease ensues when Coppelius returns and Swanilda streaks out in her underwear.

When Franz turns up, he and Coppelius quaff champagne while poring over multiple images of the blonde bombshell that begin to explode into real life in the manner of The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Red-suited blondes in high heels invade from every corner--eighteen in all--marching in luscious batterie with Mae West nonchalance. The men are stripped, bedecked, and forced to perform by relentless modern-day wilis. Coppelius dances a spoof of the traditional Spanish pas de chafe, sporting boxer shorts with a shawl, while Franz does the Scottish fling with quotes from La Sylphide and Giselle. Everyone rips off wigs and jackets--some of the blondes are blonds!--to roil in a merry riot. Swanilda gets her man and everybody gets someone.

Marin's collaborators deserve credit for the whimsical mix of fantasy and reality. Along with her choreography, Philippe Durand's photography, Montserrat Casanova's costumes, and Renaud Gaulot's sets share a grisly technical veneer with undertones of pure froth. Marin's equation of ideal love with larger-than-life images of celebrities is azany and very apt parallel. Like the internal dance puns, the technical panache of the performers added to Coppelia's effervescent atmosphere that was perfectly capped with the evenings finale. Outside on the plaza at Lincoln Center, spectators watched a fireworks display by the Grucci family that threw a rainbow of sparks off the roof of Avery Fisher Hall in celebration of Festival 96's opening performances. Voila! was the toast of the evening.