It didn’t look like being a good week on the “Search for Tomorrow” Boston Ballet soap-opera front. On Tuesday, Jeffrey Babcock was named dean of the School of the Arts at Boston University — leaving Boston Ballet with no permanent managing director as well as no permanent artistic director. (Music director Jonathan McPhee, you’ll recall, is serving as acting artistic director while the company searches to replace Maina Gielgud, who didn’t stay long enough to observe her official starting date.) And then on Wednesday the Royal Ballet — the kind of company Boston Ballet aspires to be — hit town with the ultimate work in the repertoire, Swan Lake, as if to show the locals how it’s done.

Yet it’s not all spilt milk for Boston Ballet. Babcock, who had been the cultural director of the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, was brought on in 1998 to help raise money (the company derives only 20 percent of its income from gifts) but instead leaves a debt reported at more than $1 million. And during his term as general director and CEO, Boston Ballet pushed out artistic director Anna-Marie Holmes (while claiming she quit) and replaced her with Maina Gielgud, only to have Gielgud leave. The company’s financial predicament must have been an issue for Gielgud, but it’s also possible she didn’t fancy playing second banana to the managing director. In any event, there’s reason to doubt that Babcock’s contract, which was to expire this fall, would have been renewed. With luck, Boston Ballet will find a replacement who can right the financial ship and will be willing to let the new artistic director bask in the limelight.

On stage, meanwhile, the Royal Ballet made its first appearance in Boston in more than 20 years, under the auspices of the FleetBoston Celebrity Series and the Wang Center, which have joined forces to bring a major ballet company to Boston for each of the next five years. And it threw down the gauntlet with Swan Lake. Boston Ballet, after all, is the company that made international dance headlines with its “glasnost” productions of this work in 1990 and 1992, when Bolshoi and Kirov imports Nina Ananiashvili and Alexei Fadeyechev and Tatyana Terekhova and Konstantin Zaklinsky and Yulia Makhalina graced the Wang Theatre stage. In their midst, the company’s Trinidad Sevillano and Patrick Armand and Fernando Bujones held their own. And the principals in BB’s subsequent 1994 and 1998 stagings — most notably Larissa Ponomarenko, Aleksandra Koltún, and Kyra Strasberg as Odette/Odile — haven’t exactly lowered the standard.

So how does the competition from across the Pond stack up? This Royal Ballet Swan Lake, which outgoing artistic director Anthony Dowell first staged in 1987, is dark and gritty and disturbing. Less fairy-tale Romantic than Boston Ballet’s version, it’s on the whole deeper and better. But the two are swimming in the same lake.

At the Wang, they even sounded the same — that’s because the orchestra was pretty much the Boston Ballet aggregation under Royal Ballet conductors Andrea Quinn and Philip Gammon. But the visual differences became evident as soon as the curtain rose on Yolanda Sonnabend’s act-one set, with its fence and gate that look like an overgrown brass bed and a matching folly stage right, all festooned with what resemble Christmas ornaments underneath a menacing intimation of spruce. The villagers — men in brown and orange, women in country-white skirts with green and russet bodices and ribbons — enter followed by Prince Siegfried and his retinue in realistic military uniforms. Is this Hyde Park? After a generic pas de trois (with the man in a white sailor blouse), the arrival of his princess mother brings out the boy in Siegfried; she might be Elizabeth trying to get Charles or Andrew to marry. The waltz (moved from its usual position at the outset of the act) begins sparsely, with five couples dancing on chairs, but like Tchaikovsky’s music it musters speed and color, the soldiers and their ladies joining the villagers in counterdirectional concentric circles around the Maypole. Siegfried’s tipsy tutor tries to show two little girls (sporting the kind of hat that only English schoolgirls and Leslie Caron can wear) some steps; dusk falls and a country polonaise ensues, the men clapping while the ladies urge their vanities. Then we hear the B-minor swan theme, and the crossbows come out . . .

This is serious business. There’s no Jester, as in the Boston Ballet version, to provide comic relief. And whereas Boston Ballet’s moody prince goes off alone, his crossbow hardly more than a sexual metaphor, the Royal Ballet’s bully boys are out for blood. But they’re out of their depth. The act-two scrim (an egg? a nest? “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Tales from the Darkside”?) rises on a gloomy glade, with a Caspar David Friedrich–like ruined gate stage left where eventually the Baron von Rothbart, a shaggy owl figure (as in the original 1876 libretto), will appear. Wearing shredded tulle skirts instead of the usual plate tutus, the swans look less like ballet icons and more like enchanted young women; Siegfried’s friends don’t see this, but he does as he tells them to put away their crossbow (he’s already discarded his) and leave. The swans’ movement is light and quick and cohesive; the dropped skirts allow them to form up a tight phalanx when they’re confronting Siegfried’s friend Benno. And Odette’s mime is signally clear when she asks Siegfried for protection and then explains how only the man who pledges his troth and keeps it can save her. Yet when Rothbart appears, he shrugs Siegfried off as contemptuously as Beatrix Potter’s Old Mr. Brown does Squirrel Nutkin.

The set of act three, Siegfried’s birthday bash, looks as if it could double for Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld: brass staircases on both sides, long tapers, gold-chain hangings, a smoky haze obscuring a great oval mirror (tilted slightly downward, so we can see the dancers in it), ominous red notes on the ceiling, and guests dressed as if for a Fellini masked ball. The princess-bride candidates with their ’20s faded-rose gowns and long white gloves and matching ostrich-feather mask fans are too bland and identical for comfort, and though Rothbart with his black-clad biker buddies makes a memorable entrance, the ethnic dances — Spanish, csárdás, Neapolitan, mazurka — seem less energetic and personal than their Boston Ballet equivalents. The mirror is also used to show Odette; as soon as Siegfried plights his troth to Odile, the scene is enveloped in infernal red.

There’s more crespuscular lighting in act four, where against an ironic backdrop of silver birches (symbolizing fidelity) the swans salute Rothbart, who’s back in his owl rags. The grim reality underscores Odette’s explanation, via more lucid mime, that though she forgives him, Siegfried can’t undo his mistake, and therefore she must die. Still, it’s their love that keeps Rothbart at bay as she throws herself into the lake, and when Siegfried follows, they break Rothbart’s power; the swans dance him into defeat as their theme finally achieves B major. For a moment it seems they’ll have the stage when the curtain falls, but then the birch-masted boat bearing Odette and Siegfried sails in to assure us that love survives even death.

And surveying the Royal Ballet’s quartet of Odette/Odiles, you might just believe that. Tamara Rojo is the Audrey Hepburn of the bunch, regal, exquisite, never flustered. Her very birdlike Odette may dart away in alarm but she’s never neurotic or hysterical; with Siegfried she traces a palpable arc of growing trust. And though her dance vocabulary is exquisitely articulated (for starters, she spins like a top), it’s her syntax, the way she paragraphs and phrases, that’s speaks. Her chaste, understated Odile is a mischievous little girl who keeps threatening to discover sex with Siegfried (“Ooh, do you think I should?” she whispers to Rothbart). It’s scary when during the Andante of her pas de deux with Siegfried she stands unsupported on pointe for what seems an eternity (like, she could do the Rose Adagio with no suitors), but scarier still when at last her hands tenderly cradle his head.

Miyako Yoshida is a more self-conscious Odette (think Judy Garland), more curious about Siegfried, looking warily at him out of the corner of her eye, but slow and dreamy in their pas de deux, achieving a more immediate rapport. Her teasing Odile is a prom queen (think Tiffani-Amber Thiessen on Saved by the Bell) who never doubts her star quality for a moment; seducing Siegfried is almost too easy. Leanne Benjamin is a proud, coltish Odette (Elizabeth Taylor) with exquisite articulation and languid phrasing; her Odile, however, seemed slightly arch and brittle. Zenaida Yanofsky (sister of Boston Ballet principal Yury — maybe she’d like to join him here?) is a blonde showstopper on the order of Kim Novak, and she exudes grace and class — her Odette melts into Siegfried during the violin solo in their pas de deux, and when at the end she falls into his arms, it’s with the weight of a real woman; but she too is more conventionally seductive as Odile.

Yanofsky had a sympathetic partner in Jonathan Cope, an earnest, gawky (or maybe that’s just his characterization of Siegfried), David Schwimmer type who actually wants to get married but is too shy and too special for those cookie-cutter princesses. Carlos Acosta, with his large, gentle presence, is the most regal of the three Siegfrieds the Royal Ballet presented, a prince who knows he’s worthy of Rojo and won’t accept less. Johan Kobborg, who danced with Yoshida and Benjamin, has a little less intensity and looks horrified at the thought of marriage (think Danny Kaye in White Christmas).

Boston Ballet has principals at this technical level but they don’t make it look quite so easy. After seeing four of the five performances (I passed on Saturday evening, when Rojo and Acosta repeated their opening-partnership) in a well-filled Wang Theatre, I still believe Boston Ballet’s quartet of third-act ethnic dances has more zip, and the well-behaved Royal Ballet spectators had me wishing for the Boston Ballet corps, whose members are always full of life about the edges of the main action. The choreography of the Royal’s first-act waltz and polonaise, on the other hand, beat anything I’ve seen live or on video, and the swan corps was a thing of beauty. Boston Ballet wasn’t embarrassed by this Swan Lake, but I hope everyone was taking notes.

Issue Date: June 21-28, 2001