This 'Cinderella' has its charms

Lorna Feijoo (Cinderella) and Carlos Molina (Prince Charming) during a rehearsal . (Lisa poole for the boston globe)

Reprinted from late editions of yesterday's Globe.

There's a discordance at the heart of James Kudelka's three-act "Cinderella," danced - despite the choreographic limitations - with aplomb and conviction Thursday night by the Boston Ballet at the Citi Performing Arts Center. Sergei Prokofiev's brooding score, and the production's props - near-glowing pumpkin heads here, fairy-dusting garden creatures there - tell one story, rich in moralistic, even malevolent nuance. But the action, more mime than dance, tells another, much more one-dimensional tale.

Indeed, it was almost as if this "Cinderella" - with its brilliant Art Deco sets and costumes by David Boechler - were laid atop the score rather than having sprung from its timbres and soul. Even the limpid, articulate dancing by Lorna Feijoo as Cinderella and the steely languidity of Carlos Molina as Prince Charming were not enough to carry the day.

Kudelka created his rendition of the rags-to-riches story in 2004 for the National Ballet of Canada, where he was artistic director until 2005. His aim, he's said, was to alter the reading of that second "r": It wasn't material wealth that defined his characters' castle in the sky but love and mutual respect; she rescues him (from a superficial life) as much as he rescues her. Hence their retirement, at the close, to an overgrown vegetable garden and not the standard royal palace - a grounded finale if there ever was one.

Yet important themes get lost in the translation. For starters, Cinderella's Fairy Godmother (Shannon Parsley) seems to come from nowhere; she's not, as in the original, a transformed old hag who returns to reward Cinderella for giving her a piece of bread.

The two Stepsisters - a bespectacled Heather Myers and a doofus Kathleen Breen Combes - reek with camp as one juts her head forward and skitters into a bourre, or the other splats prone at Prince Charming's feet. Both do their utmost, but Kudelka has made each a one-note song.

Finally, the Stepmother (Elizabeth Olds) is no narcissistic taskmaster but a bejeweled tippler suffering from a bad hair day. With good and evil gone the way of the Charleston (which makes its appearance here, too, at the ball), "Cinderella" as the stuff of myth loses the dramatic tension at its core.

There is a saving grace to the conception of the show: The witching hour in Act II strikes home with the force of a clock tower bell. Twelve men in black tuxes with pumpkins as heads circle around Cinderella as the Fairy Godmother's spell breaks. Cinderella is not only forlorn; she is stripped to her undies, with just one glistening toe shoe (read: glass slipper) to her name.

It is an image that stays with you long after Prince Charming has traveled round the world (Act III), the other shoe in hand, meeting all manner of shod feet - from a Dutch girl in wooden shoes to a pilot in boots - in his final quest.