MASTERPIECE THEATER: COVENT GARDEN BLOOMS ANEW.

AFTER A TWO-and-half year closure marked by politics, disaster, and controversy, London's Royal Opera House,

Covent Garden, has triumphantly opened its doors, following a $340 million facelift and extension. It was a particular triumph for the Opera House's American executive director, Michael Kaiser, a local hero for masterminding the project's tough final stages and, against many dire predictions, getting it completed on time and within budget.

Hopefully the opening will also mark a new era of excellence for London's opera and ballet, an era equally marked by what in a British governmental code word is termed "accessibility," changing what was once regarded as an exclusively elitist institution into something far more people-friendly.

The new beginning has been heralded by two great galas, the first, on December 1, attended by the Queen, the principal backers of the project, and the local press and shown live on British television, with a second identical program on the following Saturday night for the general public. They were grand programs, showing off not only the Royal Opera, and more particularly the Royal Ballet, the older and senior of the two companies, but also the expanded and refurbished theater it self, which in many ways took center stage.

For me, it was an occasion full of fond nostalgia, because I had happily been present on that other grand occasion when the Royal Ballet--then more humbly called the Sadler's Wells Ballet--had reopened Covent Garden after World War II, taking its new residence with the premiere of its Oliver Messel-designed production of the Petipa/Tchaikovsky Sleeping Beauty on February 20,1946.

Then I was up in the Gallery, not all that unlike what was depicted in the 1948 movie The Red Shoes, although we had booked seats which cost precisely--in those days--twenty cents, or in English money, half a crown! Limited-visibility seats called "slips" were also available at sixteen cents. Playbills, or programs in English usage, cost a further four cents, as did a cup of not-all-that- drinkable coffee. Those were the nights.

The first cast had Margot Fonteyn as Aurora and Robert Helpmann as her Prince. Beryl Grey danced the Lilac Fairy, and the Bluebirds were Pamela May and Alexis Rassine, while Ashton's new Florestan pas de trois was danced by Moira Shearer, Gerd Larsen, and Michael Somes. The following night the Bluebirds were the ex-Soviet ballerina Violetta (Prokhorova) Elvin, in her Western debut, and Harold Turner. Aurora was alternated by Fonteyn, May, and Shearer and, later in the season, Grey. The first new ballet was Helpmann's pompous Adam Zero on April 10,1946, and then just two weeks later, on April 24, joy of joys, surprise of surprises, Ashton's Symphonic Variations. But of course, all of this, even the casting, except, I think, for May's Aurora, was repeated--apart, mercifully, from Adam Zero--when the "fabulous" Sadler's Wells first came to America, at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1949.

But back to the future and to 1999. Inside Covent Garden's red and gilt auditorium, things have changed comparatively little. Sightlines have been generally improved by total re-seating, but the look and feel of the Victorian theater remain cozily unchanged. Backstage it is a totally different story. There are huge new public areas, including the vast Vilar Floral Hall, which is accessible (there's that word again) to all parts of the house, something new for the Covent Garden audience rigidly segregated by ticket price. The stage equipment is now state-of-the-art instead of basically turn-of-the-last-century, and within the greatly enlarged building there is a brand new small studio theater, where I saw a special Nutcracker danced by school kids (think Eliot Feld's Ballet Tech School) for school kids.

Additionally, in the main building for the first time there are rehearsal and practice studios for the Royal Ballet, which ever since it moved to Covent Garden fifty-five years ago was a long subway ride away in far-off Hammersmith. Perhaps it was this that perked up the dancers--for the first time having a house that was truly a home--for their contribution to the opening galas left the Royal Opera sedately biting the dust. The program was divided into two, with the original plan being for the ballet to go first. But it seems that Sir Bernard Haitink, director of the Royal Opera, insisted on starting the proceedings, which was just as well, for the original pattern would have led to an operatic anti-climax.

For one thing, the opera contribution was really only a concert-with the fine Covent Garden Orchestra and Chorus ranged on stage in black-tie mufti battle order. Haitink conducted a Weber overture, Placido Domigo (a long-time Covent Garden presence and favorite) and Deborah Polaski in a Wagner Ring excerpt, and the final scene from Beethoven's Fidelio. It was a start altogether more respectable than glittering, so it was left to Sir Anthony Dowell's Royal Ballet to inject the necessary excitement into proceedings looking, if not quite sounding, dangerously flat.

And this it sumptuously achieved by a simple yet powerful gush of pure nostalgia. It started with the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty, a recollection of the Royal Ballet's first move into the Opera House in February 1946, which stirred the memories of everyone, such as myself, who could recall personally the excitement of that risk-laden debut by the then-fledgling troupe, although Darcey Bussell, who managed to fall off pointe, is no Fonteyn. The rest of the program consisted of a rapid run-through collage of the company's history, complete with photo-projections of its past, and a seamless, intermissionless montage of choreographic vignettes, with only the odd omission of the choreographic contributions of Helpmann, John Cranko, and even De Valois herself.

But the Royal Ballet, much criticized of late, with Dowell himself a popular but lame-duck director, exceeded almost all expectation in putting its best foot forward. Its stars were well to the fore, including Sylvie Guillem, Bussell, Viviane Durante, Irek Mukhamedov, and newcomers: Cuban-born Carlos Acosta from the Houston Ballet and the Danish Johan Kobborg. Here also was American Ballet Theatre's Angel Corella making his brilliant Royal Ballet debut in an excerpt from Romeo and Juliet and the Bronze Idol solo from La Bayadere.

It was a time for recognition of a great company, with all its memories, most of them shared by a sizeable contingent of Americans on hand, and the recognition that the still necessary work of rebuilding its traditions looks as though it might proceed apace. It was also encouraging that the Royal Ballet showed enormous enterprise in its programming choices for its much-heralded proper solo re-entry into the Royal Opera House a few days later with a repertory program on December 6. Unfortunately enterprise, untouched by genius, is rarely enough. At least it took a brave jump into the unknown with two world premieres sandwiching a series of fragments, most of them featuring guest artists, generically and hopefully called: "A Celebration of Inter national Choreography."

The premieres were both British: A Stranger's Taste by Siobhan Davies, one of Britain's leading modem-dance choreographers, and Hidden Variables by Ashley Page, in apparent function if not name, the troupe's resident choreographer. Davies is usually an interesting creator, but here--working with the Royal Ballet for the first time--with the women barefoot and the men in dance slippers, and using an eclectic mix of music, she has fallen back upon oddly Grahamesque cliches embedded uneasily in an amorphous structure.

If the dancers did comparatively little for Davies, they seemed the sole strength of Page's disorganized and diffuse Hidden Variables, where Mara Galeazzi and Laura Morera vie for the attentions of the dazzling Acosta (all excellent, by the way), against a background of violently meaningless dances. The design by Anthony McDonald and the lighting by Peter Mumford were obviously and successfully intended to show off the technical prowess of the new stage. Unfortunately it was merely the not inconsiderable technical prowess of his dancers that Page showed off in his emotionally inexpressive choreography.

The "international" section of the program was shoehorned between the premieres, and this with one exception consisted of excerpts from full-scale works. The exception was a wispy but rewarding duet from John Neumeier, set to Shostakovich, with a solid Bussell partnered staunchly by guest Otto Bubenicek from Neumeier's own Hamburg Ballet.

All these bits and pieces had, by the way, a North American connection. Two came from the National Ballet of Canada, both well-danced by the Canadian pair of Greta Hodgkinson and Rex Harrington: a tantalizingly interesting duet from American Glen Tetley's Tagore, and the "Summer" pas de deux from Canadian James Kudelka's The Four Seasons. This latter, seen in New York last season, lost something from being tom from its context, as, most definitely, did a solitary duet from Peter Martin's Barber Violin Concerto, diligently performed by New York City Ballet's Darci Kistler and Jock Soto.

Although apparently in accordance with the choreographer's present wishes, it also seemed an odd idea to give just the last piece of Nacho Duato's Remanso, created a couple of seasons back for American Ballet Theatre, which, although decently danced by a Royal Ballet home team of Acosta, Jonathan Cope, and Inaki Urlezaga, looked lost on the huge stage while the shorn version became necessarily elusive in its wit and connotations.

One big difference which no one commented on was that in 1946 all the dancers, apart from Prokhorova, were British or British commonwealth, and most had been through the company's school. Today there are probably almost as many foreign-born dancers as British, and comparatively few of the principals and soloists are home-trained. At least the Royal Ballet School, after years of slump, appears to be putting its act together, and perhaps will start producing British dancers.

But, leaving the new/old Opera House, and waiting for my coat in the new friendly-but-not-unduly-workable cloakroom, I was soon back to 1946 when the Royal Ballet had first taken possession. Then it played it safe and grand with that new Sleeping Beauty, but safe or not, it seemed and indeed was the opening of a new era in ballet history. The opening offered no such revelation, but the Royal Ballet dancers--traditionally always up for the big occasion--as a group looked better than they have for some time past. Perhaps the greatness that has effectively eluded the company virtually since Ashton's retirement as Artistic Director in 1970 is just around the corner.