Further longer.

Perhaps I ought to start, as they used to say in the old magazine serials, with my story up till now. Last month I examined the popularity, and indeed the historic validity, of the fulllength ballet over the one-act work which, of course, dominated the Diaghilev Ballets Russes and many of its successors, ranging from the Col. de Basil's Original Ballet Russe and Serge Denham's Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, to New York City Ballet and even, in theory, Britain's Royal Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. Yet since the middle of the twentieth century the tide of public favor appears to have been turning inexorably toward the fulllength work.

We are--in my view luckily--far from such a point yet, but the time could come when the one-act ballet is almost as rare a bird in the repertory aviary as the one-act play or the one-act opera: still certainly existing but somewhat on sufferance and something of a curiosity. However, as I pointed out last month, this shift in repertory raises enormous questions. First, where is one to find these monster works? Unlike an opera company, or for that matter an orchestra or even a repertory drama troupe, we have no readily accessible storehouse of classics upon which we can draw. Moreover, since the moves toward twelve-tone and electronic music, few major composers have produced--or even could produce--scores that have a readily acceptable theatrical viability.

Only two full-length ballet scores, Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, both by Prokofiev, have entered the general rep-ertory this century. Others have been attempted--the John Cranko-Benjamin Britten Prince of the Pagodas, brought this summer in a later version by Kenneth MacMillan to Lincoln Center Festival 97 by the Royal Ballet, springs to mind. Even closer to home there is Elliot Goldenthal's score for Lar Lubovitch's Othello, commissioned and premiered by ABT this season. Other full-length ballet scores include Hans Werner Henze's Ondine for Ashton, Nicolas Nabokov's Don Quixote for Balanchine, Peter Maxwell Davies's Salome for Flemming Flindt, and a whole raft of scores provided by Soviet composers from Dmitri Shostakovich on downwards. Still, despite the gamelanlike charms of Britten, Prokofiev stands virtually alone. (At press time ABT's Othello had not premiered.)

Other musical possibilities do exist. John Cranko, who commissioned full-length work from Britten, also initiated a perhaps more practical, almost braver, and certainly more far-reaching substitute. Beginning with Onegin, he came up with the idea of patchworking existing music (orchestrated Tchaikovsky piano pieces in this case) into a brand-new full-length ballet score. (A little earlier Vaslav Orlikowsky in his Peer Gynt had used an expanded version of Grieg's incidental music for the Ibsen work, and Balanchine had created 4 Midsummer Night's Dream using Mendelssohn's well-known score similarly expanded.) Cranko's solution was enthusiastically followed by other choreographers, such as MacMillan with his Manon, set to Massenet, and his Mayerling, to Liszt.

There are also a few nineteenth-century scores about that are no longer attached to any particular choreography, as Ashton discovered; he helped himself to Delibes's Sylvia and Messager's The Two Pigeons and had John Lanchbery reconstruct, invent, and generally concoct a newly serviceable score for La Fille Mal Gardee. For the adventurous, not to suggest foolhardy, there are many full-length Soviet scores, suet as Gliere's The Red Poppy and Asafiev's The Flames of Paris.

So, here we are with the musical possibilities: commission, invent (or orchestrate), or borrow. But then there is the matter of staging and choreography. Generally speaking, a full-length work costs at least as much, and probably markedly more, than three one-act ballets, where scenery can probably be at a minimum and costuming might be little more than leotards and tights. So the capital investment and proportionate financial risk is, for the average American company, daunting. Finally, once you have solved your music problem and gathered together your capital investment, where do you get your choreographer? How many choreographers are there around whom you could commission with any kind of equanimity?

During the past few months I have seen three companies try to answer all these questions in strongly differing fashion, yet all with quite gratifying success. First, I saw Christopher Wheeldon's new A Midsummer Night's Dream for Colorado Ballet, then Ben Stevenson's Dracula for Houston Ballet, and, finally, a staging by Natalia Dudinskaya and others of Petipa's Le Corsaire for Boston Ballet. All were well received by both audiences and critics. Furthermore, all could be regarded as useful, permanent additions--at least for the occasional revival--and could be lent out to other troupes; Dracula--this is a true and useful sign--was actually a joint production with Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre.

Houston's million-dollar Dracula clearly takes nineteenth-century models. Lanchbery, adapter and orchestrator extraordinaire, has provided music from lesser-known Liszt and developed a fascinating score. Stevenson has transformed, cut, and generally reshaped Bram Stoker's original novel into an entirely viable and highly dramatic ballet scenario. The ballet's structure and style start off recalling Swan Lake, with a bat-winged and Rothbart-like Dracula provided with a bevy of blood-drained zombie wives, and continues with a second act thrown, Coppelia fashion, into a village square, and ends something like Giselle. A mishmash, but a working mishmash.

Boston's spectacular version of Petipa's Corsaire, the first given by a Western company, is one of those old Russian ballets, like La Bayadere, which survived the tsars and Stalin alike and still lives, brazen if battered, to tell the tale. The Boston version derives directly from the 1992 Bolshoi production by Konstantin Sergeyev (it even uses the same ornately pastel scenery and costumes) and is packed to the brim with fantastically good dancing. With its four or five different casts in a bewildering number of virtuoso roles, it revealed almost sensationally the company and its strength in depth.

Martin Fredmann for his Colorado Ballet took a different kind of chance in inviting Wheeldon, a comparatively untried choreographer, to take his first crack at a full-length Midsummer Night's Dream that was not Balanchine's, Ashton's, or Neumeier's. Using largely familiar music and showing familial respect for his masters, Wheeldon pulled off a coup and, like the other choreographers mentioned here, beautifully displayed a company.

The new, or newish, full-evening ballet is a practicality. All it needs is faith, hope, charity, and a little bit of luck.