MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : GREGORY IN ‘QUIXOTE’

At 39, after 20 years as a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre, Cynthia Gregory has earned the right to bask in the public’s adulation. And she did on Friday night in Shrine Auditorium. However, her performance as Kitri in “Don Quixote” scarcely suggested the qualities that have secured her stardom.

Exuding a forced vivacity, she downplayed every opportunity for temperament or sensuality, and even her celebrated technique here seemed strangely inadequate.

True, Gregory retained her mastery of turns throughout the ballet and sustained majestic balances in the Act III pas de deux. But she could barely approximate the soaring jumps, sharp pointe attacks and pliant back bends the role demands.

Although he avoided the customary one-arm lifts, Patrick Bissell (replacing Ross Stretton) otherwise danced full-out as Basil--always devastatingly magnetic and powerful, yet never abandoning the concentration on elegance and control that has marked most of his performances this season.

The Friday “Don Quixote” offered especially refined dancing in the dream sequence, with Leslie Browne a highly gracious, buoyant Mercedes and Amanda McKerrow a notably delicate, fleet Amour.

Elsewhere, Daniel Baudendistel made a nimble, relatively restrained Gamache, and Robert Hill’s icy intensity as Espada gave a compelling edge to the bravado of his dancing.