ALESSANDRA FERRI IN MacMILLAN BALLET : A HEARTBREAKING NEW JULIET

Some Juliets break your heart when they give vent to the star-cross’d ecstasies of the balcony duet with Romeo. Some Juliets break your heart in the bedroom scene when, engulfed in erotic bliss and tragic foreboding, they endure the sweet sorrow of parting.

Many break your heart when they resolve to imbibe the potentially fatal potion. Virtually all Juliets break your heart in the crushing, ironic agonies of the tomb scene.

Alessandra Ferri, who danced her first Juliet in Los Angeles on Thursday with American Ballet Theatre at Shrine Auditorium, isn’t like the others. She breaks your heart very early in the evening.

When first we see her, teasing her cuddly nurse and toying with the prospects of adulthood and marriage, she is febrile, healthy, happy, exceptionally mercurial.

Her vitality seems irrepressible. Her frame may be fragile, but her temperament--a patently Latin temperament--confirms strength.

This Juliet is no demure little ballerina embarking on a romantic saga. She is an irresistible, potentially tough little creature, all too eager to take on the mysteries of life and love. Paris seems nice enough. Excitement looms.

Then she sees Romeo. This newcomer seems even nicer. She acknowledges him at first with just a hint of coquetry. She bends to him. She even laughs at him. Her gaze follows him everywhere. Obviously, she is intrigued. Gradually, she becomes mesmerized.

When her kinsmen treat the intruder with politesse that stops considerably short of warmth, she is confused. She asks her nurse who the stranger is. The old woman whispers the answer in Juliet’s ear. He is a hated Montague.

At this usually innocuous juncture, Ferri’s face tells everything. Her huge, dark eyes become clouded. Her jaw drops. She turns pale (I swear it). Her body stiffens. She stares straight ahead--stunned, disbelieving, terrified.

In one crucial instant, an instant that threatens never to end, death casts its shadow on this innocent child. The premonition of doom is palpable.

Ferri does not dance Juliet with absolute technical perfection. But she dances the role beautifully, sensitively and, above all, expressively.

She does not command the sheer physical flexibility, for instance, that would permit her to define rapture, once and forever, with the impossible arching of the back in a passage of propulsive abandon. But she is fleet and deft, always bright.

Watch how she floats up the stairs with airy magnetism at the end of the first act. Even more important, watch her when she reaches the balcony as she thrusts, flings, stretches her arms toward her lover in a futile plea for one more embrace.

Ferri isn’t just a dancer. She is an actress who happens to dance.

Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography has always brought out the best in an artist like this. The “Romeo and Juliet” he created two decades ago for the Royal Ballet in London and re-created last year for Ballet Theatre surges with grandiose, nearly operatic passions. Ferri seizes those passions and embellishes them, refocuses them, shades them, enlarges them.

There are moments when she approaches frenzy, when she threatens to lose control, when the pathos threatens to become overwrought. A Juliet who gives too much, however, is preferable to one who gives too little.

And on those rare occasions when Ferri does give too much, she does so with such conviction, such authority, such whole-hearted urgency, that the alternative virtues of understatement seem irrelevant.

She does, of course, rise eloquently to the obvious challenges in the latter parts of the ballet: the hysterical dash, cape flying behind her, to Friar Laurence; the nervous episode in which she weighs the consequences of trying to evade her fate; the pathetic would-be pas de deux in which Romeo wants to revive her limp, weightless form; the desperate--yet infinitely tender--Shakespearean Liebestod in which she discovers Romeo’s corpse, stabs herself, and, transfigured, returns to the bier where she reaches out to touch her lover’s hand for a final, eternal moment.

A Juliet such as Ferri deserves a cast of lofty equals. She didn’t get that on this occasion but, in general, the ABT team performed with style, ardor and suavity--more, in fact, than the initial efforts last year led one to expect.

Kevin McKenzie remains a considerate, intelligent, ultracompetent, lean and handsome Romeo, if not a charismatic one. Danilo Radojevic makes much of the playful virtuosity required of Mercutio, even though he remains too boyish to be persuasively debonair. Wes Chapman introduces a nice, bland Benvolio. Clark Tippet reduces Tybalt to a hulking sadist, which, though legitimate, seems unnecessarily one-dimensional.

Georgina Parkinson mimes the grief-stricken extravagances of Lady Capulet elegantly. Ross Stretton, himself a Romeo on occasion, brings nobility to the passing passivity of Paris. Michael Owen delivers a rather feeble Capulet, John Taras a stuffily sanctimonious Friar, Susan Jones a pertly padded Nurse.

The crowd scenes in Nicholas Georgiadis’ lush, faintly stylized Verona may not be as crowded as one might wish. Still, the assorted frolics, processions, celebrations, riots, duels and courtly rituals are dispatched with abiding finesse.

In the pit, Prokofiev’s miraculous score is treated with aggressive, loving care by Alan Barker and a somewhat undernourished orchestra.