‘Sylvia’ lives partly by its principals

Ballets don’t often get second chances. A play that initially flops can sit in a library for centuries and be revived with its original text intact. So can an opera or symphony. But once choreography fades from living memory, it’s usually gone for good.

That nearly happened to Frederick Ashton’s “Sylvia,” a three-act 1952 vehicle for Margot Fonteyn that never gained a permanent place in the Royal Ballet repertory despite numerous revisions (some of them drastic). Ashton is widely regarded as one of the greatest 20th century choreographers, but this neoclassic extravaganza came very close to being lost forever.

Fortunately, the Royal Ballet pieced it together two years ago with the help of vintage films and the acumen of choreologist Christopher Newton -- and American Ballet Theatre brought the Newton reconstruction to the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Friday.

Based on an 1876 Parisian source, this was Ashton’s second full-length work, and you can easily spot ideas that he developed to greater effect in later masterworks such as “La Fille Mal Gardee” (the rollicking, workaday villagers) and “The Dream” (the nocturnal revels of the spirit world).

The mythological plot he inherited has little coherence or relevance to human experience, focusing on a chaste huntress beset by admirers while being manipulated and later rescued by the god Eros. And though Ashton often rose to the occasion with dances of great verve and purity of style, major lapses include nearly all of Act 2: perhaps the dullest choreography he ever created.

However, “Sylvia” made lots of people happy in Segerstrom Hall on Friday, despite an overload of technically ragged and stylistically crude dancing from the Ballet Theatre corps. For starters, its period designs by Robin and Christopher Ironside (supplemented with contributions by Peter Farmer) made it look like a traditional, sumptuous 19th century classic (though, of course, it isn’t).

Better still, the antique score by Leo Delibes remains such glorious theater music -- so lush, brilliant, sweeping -- that even the tinny playing of the Pacific Symphony (with David LaMarche conducting) couldn’t diminish the afterglow.

You could argue that the conservatism of the audience that can afford ballet tickets these days has given “Sylvia” its second chance simply because that audience craves ever more backdated tutu-and-tiara spectacle -- and such companies as Ballet Theatre have already largely exhausted the list of genuine 19th century relics.

Maybe so, but the combination of minor Ashton and major Delibes does give star dancers a number of glittering opportunities, and the Friday principals certainly seized them skillfully.

In the title role, Gillian Murphy couldn’t make much of the mock-seductive mummery in Act 2, but she presided over the huntress corps with enormous power in Act 1 and brought dazzling speed and precision to her last-act pizzicato variation.

Replacing Maxim Beloserkovsky (Murphy’s usual partner in this ballet), Angel Corella played Sylvia’s ineffectual true love with great sweetness and plenty of world-class (if occasionally forced) virtuosity. He also worked diligently at the demanding lifts of the last-act duet.

As Sylvia’s brutal abductor, Marcelo Gomes was able to partner Murphy strongly while (as the role demanded) looking increasingly drunk and clumsy -- a difficult task brought off with distinction.

Playing the alternately majestic and impish Eros, Carlos Lopez proved equally gifted at energetic shape shifting and prolonged sculptural stillness -- though his Act 3 solo (like much of the dancing on Friday) looked bumptious, not exactly an Ashtonian virtue.

Influenced by the multitude of storybook characters in the last act of “The Sleeping Beauty,” Ashton introduced a dizzying array of mythological figures in his finale: Apollo and all nine Muses (beat that, Balanchine), Persephone and Pluto (no, not Disney’s Pluto) and a pair of goats capering a la Puss in Boots and the White Cat.

Instead of obsessing over these divertissements, he might well have worked harder at clarifying and deepening the narrative.

“Sylvia” eminently deserves its second chance, but its flaws loomed as large as its pleasures in Costa Mesa on Friday.