Marius Petipa, the great Russian ballet master, had been choreographing for 50 years by the time he created Raymonda. Fifty years of stories and spectacles including Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, La Bayadere, and dozens of others that didn’t outlive the 19th century. It can’t have been easy to find new twists on the standard ballet plot: girl and boy fall in love, fate separates them, but they’re reunited after two or three acts devoted to entertainments, dueling, treachery, magic, and maybe a thunderstorm. You can see why Petipa settled for the feeble plot that became Raymonda.

Last Wednesday, Raymonda kicked off the Bolshoi Ballet’s six-week American tour at the Wang Theatre, as the opening dance presentation in the 2004–2005 Bank of America Celebrity Series. The legendary Moscow company hadn’t visited Boston in 15 years, but we didn’t get to see its most modern creation, a scandalous update on Romeo and Juliet that will go to Minneapolis, Seattle, and Berkeley.

Raymonda owes its longevity to its wonderful, danceable score by Aleksandr Glazunov and its generous dance opportunities for the ballerina, her two rival swains, and the ensemble. Choreographed in 1984, Yuri Grigorovich’s Raymonda is a curiosity that tilts backward, leaning on both the pre-revolutionary Imperial ballet model and the Soviet revisionism of the 1950s and ’60s, a style invented mainly by Grigorovich. With its eviscerated classicism and its proletarian virtuosity, it gives us dancing, dancing, dancing, but not much theatrical juice.

By the time Grigorovich got to Raymonda, he had already rewritten several other classics and was making a new repertory about slave uprisings and deservedly punished capitalists: Spartacus, Ivan the Terrible, The Stone Flower, Golden Age. The original Raymonda actually hints at a class dialectic, but Grigorovich doesn’t explore it beyond some routine social typecasting.

Raymonda, a member of the medieval French nobility, is betrothed to the knight Jean de Brienne. While Jean is away at the Crusades, a Saracen knight visits the palace and tries to seduce the unwilling Raymonda. Jean returns just in time to slay the barbarian and marry the ballerina. According to ballet convention, racial and national differences can facilitate variety in the dance material. Noblemen dance in the purest classical style; villains, outsiders, slaves, and sensualists have movement that’s dramatic, exotic, or pantomimic. Abderakhman, as an Oriental, is not only an exotic but an infidel and a potential invader — a triple threat. So how does he get invited to the palace in the first place? Raymonda recognizes him as a bad guy right away because of his overwrought acting and Baroque jumping.

The foreigner is accompanied by an obsequious retinue of prancing primitives and passionate Spaniards who get to entertain the gentry and aren’t troubled by their lowly rank in the dance hierarchy. For the third act’s famous grand pas hongrois, Jean de Brienne and Andrew King of Hungary bring along packs of mazurka and csardas folk to dance at the wedding alongside the nobility. But despite these differing dance characteristics, one number begins to look like the others.

All cleaned out and rearranged as a dance show, Grigorovich’s Raymonda grows monotonous. It’s partly the fault of the production and partly a company style that seems to value neutrality. The big presentation scenes that dominate all three acts lack the bustle of realistic onlookers in the background. The tempi are universally spirited. An ill-conceived lighting design focuses follow spots on the leading dancers and consigns the hardworking corps to a gloomy background. They fade into anonymous filler, even when they’re making interesting patterns, and the principals aren’t much more individual.

The opening-night Raymonda, Nadezhda Gracheva, was bold and correct but expressively inert. At the Thursday performance, the audience responded readily when Maria Allash rushed on with a smiling impetuosity. She danced well, but she wore the same smile most of the evening, so it lost its effect. The two Jeans, Sergey Filin and Alexander Volchkov, were well-behaved, but neither one of them looked smitten.

It’s mind-boggling to consider that the other great reformer of the 20th century, George Balanchine, shared with Yuri Grigorovich the desire to cleanse ballet of excess but preserve its essential dance values. After staging a complete Raymonda in 1946 (with Alexandra Danilova), Balanchine revisited Glazunov’s score several times, leaving the plot behind altogether. His Pas de Dix, Raymonda Variations, and Cortege Hongrois are studies in brilliant technique, texture, scale, variety, and dynamics for every dancer. There’s no deeper way to experience ballet
tradition than this.