"Swan Lake" by Australian Ballet at Koch Theater It's best to get disappointments over with before a show starts. As my companion to watch the Australian Ballet's "Swan Lake" I invited an old friend who has known "Swan Lake" for decades. Two hours before Saturday's performance at the David H. Koch Theater she e-mailed me to say that she was looking forward to it because Australia has real black swans, and she was eager to see the connection onstage. I informed her hurriedly that this "Swan Lake" was the one about Diana, Charles and Camilla, and that Australian black swans were not on offer. Swan Lake From left, Lucinda Dunn, Madeleine Eastoe and Kevin Jackson performing in the Australian Ballet's production at the David H. Koch Theater on Friday night. Other disappointments, however, lay ahead. Perhaps the most obvious one is that with this production as its calling card, the Australian Ballet, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, is not serious about wanting to be a serious classical ballet company. The opening-up and opening-out of the body that is basic to ballet's classicism doesn't really occur here; women dance on point but with arms folding in to express inhibitions. The step most famously associated with "Swan Lake," the ballerina's multiple fouetté turns, does occur, and more or less to the right music, though as a depiction of rage and frustration. But "Swan Lake" can succeed in a nonclassical way. The clever thing about this production, whose concept is by Graeme Murphy, Janet Vernon and Kristian Fredrikson, is that it links the modern legend of Diana, the Princess of Wales, to the central psychodrama of Tchaikovsky's ballet. Diana dreamed of ballet and took class with celebrity dancers; "Swan Lake" involves royalty, another woman who steals the prince's heart and the despair of the heroine. Tchaikovsky's music, theatrically effective in all circumstances, does its stuff; the audience applauds heartily. I should add that Diana, Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles are not given those names here. This "Swan Lake" - designed by Mr. Fredrikson to be nicely ambiguous about which country and which part of the 20th century it takes place in - tells the tale of Odette, Prince Siegfried and Baroness von Rothbart. The stage queen, resembling no member of the current British royal family, displays a frosty vulgarity that would be snobbishly dismissed by some English people as "N.Q.O.C.D." ("not quite our class, darling"). The length of the train on Odette's wedding dress certainly prods memories of Diana. The choreography, by Mr. Murphy, has several pas de trois for the leading characters surely planned to illustrate Diana's famous line, "There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded." But there are no royal balcony waves, no corgis and no fatal car crash. There's no sense of lampoon either. Important parts of the action occur in a sanatorium, where the psychotic Odette is guarded by nuns; the even more important parts happen in her mind, where she dreams of ballet and swans. Odette does better than Diana did at winning back the prince's affections. Though she does not end up happily ever after with Siegfried, it's clear he won't return to Camilla von Rothbart. All this works well enough. But I can't help feeling that this "Swan Lake," new in 2002, is an exercise in opportunism. It cashes in on the Diana story, which is fair game, but it also cashes in on Tchaikovsky's score without ever opening its heart to the production. The way that dances and acting scenes are fitted to certain beats or phrases, but not others, feels arbitrary and often clumsy. The score has been reordered and cut in ways that have even more disregard for its internal structure than usual. The central idea of swans is where the production is dimmest. Its heroine retreats to her distorted idea of ballet and swans when she can't deal with real life, but the swan aspect is entirely incidental. Instead of giving us ballet as the sublimated language of the soul, the dancing gives us a world where the wildness and beauty of swans has become fragmented by conflicted impulses. This has some limited psychological effectiveness, but we're made to watch something small and cut up while the music, and a few sporadic images of ballet's amplitude, evoke larger dramas than any sustained here. The Australians, presenting this production in four performances at the end of their week at Lincoln Center, fielded two casts of the three lead roles. Saturday's cast was led by Madeleine Eastoe (Odette), Kevin Jackson (Prince Siegfried) and Lucinda Dunn (Baroness von Rothbart) - all as effective as Mr. Murphy's choreography would allow. But this isn't pro-dancer choreography; it never shows their capacities for sustained phrasing or refined energy. New York City Ballet Orchestra played particularly well under the baton of the Australian Ballet's music director and chief conductor, Nicolette Fraillon, but this version involves some appalling changes of tempo in the middle of individual sections. As for the most famous theme in Tchaikovsky's score - which ties swans, mystery and fate together - it's astonishing how often it's allowed to wash over the action as if irrelevant.