GORDON & GOREY’S ‘MURDER’ : BARYSHNIKOV INTRODUCES A CARTOON BALLET

American Ballet Theatre has been having a little trouble with tonal focus in its new productions this year.

Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s “Requiem,” which opened the Los Angeles season Tuesday, tried to be novel and pious but, thanks largely to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s bubble-gum score, ended up being trite and tawdry.

John Taras’ “Francesca da Rimini,” which the company wisely left in San Francisco, tried to be profound and poignant but ended up being raunchy and silly.

Wednesday night at Shrine Auditorium, our favorite touring terpsichoreans turned to David Gordon’s “Murder.” At least this one was supposed to be funny, and it was. After a fashion.

It was zany, wild, goofy, satirical, fuzzy and fast, in a blithely feather-brained, featherweight way.

Gordon apparently was given carte blanche to mock, diddle and inspire the noble danseurs and blissful ballerinas at his command. Mikhail Baryshnikov--himself and, er, herself!--romped good-naturedly through the leading role(s).

The choreographer--actually, he prefers to be called a constructor--was given whimsically economical props: a coffin, a door, a sofa, a pseudo-horse--designed in inimitable Gothic black, white and gray by none less than Edward Gorey, who also concocted the embellished unitards that served as costumes.

For 24 pleasantly vapid and intensely compressed minutes, Gordon explores the happy cliches of bloody mysteries.

First, he gives us a prologue, narrated, via tape, with crisp British inflections by his wife, Valda Setterfield. It is a sweet mime escapade in which the stage is strewn with decorous corpses and entangled with 16 characters, all of whom happen to bear the name Smith , or a reasonable variation thereof.

Then comes the quasi-ballet itself. For accompaniment, Gordon usurps the portentous and overwrought first movement of Berlioz’s “Grande symphonie funebre et triomphale.”

For action, Gordon stirs together a nifty conglomeration of familiar images: the mad scientist, the feckless hero, the dauntless detective, the sickly waif, the fiery femme fatale, the exotic spy, the debonair villain. Just about everyone pops up, in no particular order and with no particular logic, from Mikhail Frankenstein to Boris Badenov to Olga Tchikaboumskaya.

Cute, cute, cute.

The action jerks along swiftly and with gleeful pizazz. The large, stylish cast knocks itself out for the relief of innocent merriment. Paul Connelly does what he can to salvage Berlioz in the understaffed pit.

Baryshnikov executes brilliant double takes, emits horrendous silent screams, dances daintily in deathly drag, exudes boyish ardor one moment and ghastly evil the next. He offers terrific imitations of Gene Wilder, Danny Kaye, Charlie Chaplin, Norma (not Moira) Shearer and, I think, Sylvester the Cat. Unfortunately, he doesn’t dance much.

Nobody dances much. There was more dancing, in fact, in “Noises Off.”

“Murder” is just a skit. A comedy routine. A live cartoon.

There is nothing wrong with that, though the inherent wit does tend to evaporate in the vast open spaces of the 6,000-seat Shrine. We have seen far worse cartoons.

Unfortunately, we were led to expect something more than a cartoon. In an advance interview with Lewis Segal on these pages, Gordon spoke of a desire to make a statement about the absurdity and power of Romantic excess.

Absurdity? Sure.

Power? Well . . . .

“Murder,” according to Baryshnikov in the same interview, “is not a slapstick, laugh-for-laugh comedy . . . . It’s very subtle, attached to an intellectual idea.”

Something must have gotten lost in the translation from rehearsal hall to stage.

The Berlioz music, quoth Baryshnikov, is “so colossal, so powerful, so pompous, any attempt at campiness just doesn’t go anywhere.”

Too true.

“I’m taking his art very seriously,” said Baryshnikov of David Gordon.

One can’t blame him, especially after last year’s “Field, Chair and Mountain.” Still, for all its quaint gags and classy gurgles, “Murder” seems like much ado about little.

The other items on the agenda duplicated repertory performed the night before. A very ethereal Marianna Tcherkassky and a very dashing Danilo Radojevic brought special distinction to the curtain-raiser, “La Bayadere.” The razzle-dazzle valedictory, Balanchine’s “Bourree Fantasque,” enlisted Carla Stallings and Gil Boggs, Leslie Browne and Ross Stretton, Amy Rose and David Cuevas as the contrasting couples.