THAT WHICH IS SPELLED ‘PETRUCHKA’ TO PREMIERE

What’s in a spelling? More than you might think.

These days “Petrushka” is the now-common transliteration from the Russian for the famous Fokine-Stravinsky ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev in 1911 for his Ballets Russes and featuring Vaslav Nijinsky. Formerly, stage producers and record company arbiters preferred the Frenchified “Petrouchka.”

But David Wilcox, artistic director of the Long Beach Ballet, is advertising his version of the one-act period piece as “Petruchka,” and admits that his spelling was a mistake.

“We had already mailed out 140,000 brochures with the error,” he confesses somewhat sheepishly. “So, we were pretty much stuck with it.”

But since Wilcox sees his staging--which receives its premiere Friday at the Long Beach Center Theatre and plays three additional performances over the weekend--as a departure from what he calls “the standard burlesque ballet and fun piece,” there is some inadvertent justification to his originality.

“I got the idea to do the ballet,” he says, “after looking over the Center Theatre. Because of its intimacy and a stage area that extends almost to the audience’s lap, I saw the terrific possibilities for mime and dramatic characterization. Here was my chance to transform a libretto that had always seemed muddled into something powerfully clear.”

Wilcox, who says he danced professionally for seven years with the Berlin Ballet and took the role of the Head Coachman in that company’s “Petrushka,” returned here to form the Long Beach Ballet four seasons ago. Sitting in the lounge of his studio, while rehearsals for the mixed-bill are calmly proceeding, the West Covina native speaks with a degree of reserve that doesn’t entirely mask his intensity.

“Despite the benefits of subsidy in Germany, there were many drawbacks,” he allows. “I found the atmosphere stifling, too socialistic. Bureaucracy dominates. It even seeps into the creative departments. So the prospects here seemed good by contrast.”

Those prospects consuming him at the moment involve figuring out--with the help of Chris Tabor, who dances the title role--how to clarify the story of the sawdust puppet with a human soul. His goal, as he explains it, is “to make the expressive meanings of Fokine’s choreography come alive.

“There’s a reason, for instance, that Petruchka is different from the Ballerina and Blackamoor (the other puppets in this show within a show). His knees fall inward and he stands crooked because he’s crippled, really, deformed. This posture isn’t just to represent pathos, it’s supposed to suggest that the Charlatan has let him go to disrepair. And so we understand why he hates the Charlatan.”

Wilcox believes that only when these points are illustrated can the “raggedy straw man” reflect real tragedy, as opposed to the generalized hapless creature commonly portrayed. And he credits Tabor with the inspiration to reach these new dramatic depths.

Just finished with his rehearsal for one of the other pieces being premiered, the Petrushka of the moment appears, dripping with perspiration. “When I danced the role before (with Switzerland’s Basel Ballet),” says a winded Tabor, “the production was more surreal than this one. But much of the characterization I’m doing now I ‘osmosed’ from Heinz Spoerli’s choreography.”

With his own dramatic-dancing credentials in order--a principal in several companies including those in Basel and Cleveland and a soloist with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens--Tabor now is concentrating on bringing the other dancers up to par as thespians of a sort.

“One of our big challenges,” he says, “is getting them to use their actors’ imaginations and not just see themselves doing steps. But when there’s so much enthusiasm, which is a great contrast with the civil servant attitude of dancers in Europe, the whole thing seems easier.”

As for dealing with the problem of a small playing area and the busy, cluttered mise-en-scene of St. Petersburg’s Shrovetide Fair, Tabor says he has devised ways of refocusing the action “by having the characters point to incidents beyond the stage.” Wilcox mentions that the modest $8,000 budget covers his minimal designs being executed by technical director Charles Davis, with costumes sewn by volunteers.

“Ours may not be the opulent kind of staging Berlin and Basel produce,” says Wilcox. “But we think we compensate for that with our dramatic inspiration.”