"Cinderella" Tries the Fit With Ballet Arizona Alexander Iziliaev Cinderella From left, Amber Lewis, Paola Hartley, Kenna Draxton and Randy Crespo in this Ballet Arizona production. PHOENIX - Few careers in ballet have shown a more remarkable trajectory than that of Ib Andersen. I remember him in 1979 in Copenhagen as a young star of the Royal Danish Ballet (he had been the youngest principal in its history), shining in several of the mid-19th-century classics by the Danish master August Bournonville. A year later Mr. Andersen was a principal of New York City Ballet, where he created roles in new ballets by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. The Ballet Arizona's Jillian Barrell in the lead role of "Cinderella" at Symphony Hall in Phoenix, a home base for the artistic director Ib Andersen. Since 2000 he has been based in Phoenix - a city less like Copenhagen is hard to imagine - where, as artistic director of Ballet Arizona and its school, he is a true ballet master, teaching, choreographing, creating a repertory and training a company. Each year he presents a program of Balanchine ballets for the company; the one I saw in 2010 was excellent. His "Nutcracker" (2001, revised 2006) is one of the three finest productions of the nearly 20 I've seen across America outside New York. He has made a supply of new ballets and supervised several productions of the 19th-century classics, so that much of the company's repertory is shaped by him. It's an exceptional achievement. Last weekend I watched four performances at Symphony Hall of his most recent full-length story ballet, the three-act "Cinderella" (2011), which uses Prokofiev's score. His is in no way an innovative "Cinderella": it uses borrowed designs, and its scenario makes no surprising departures from the standard story. And yet it proves more touching, funny and musical than the more obviously rethought productions - with the same score - by David Bintley (Birmingham Royal Ballet), James Kudelka (American Ballet Theater) and Christopher Wheeldon (San Francisco Ballet). Above all, it tells the "Cinderella" story with compelling human detail. The frictions between Cinderella's father and stepmother (Astrit Zejnati and Kenna Draxton) include vivid arguments, both painful and absurd. For Cinderella (Jillian Barrell and the Cuban newcomer Arianni Martin alternating in the role), her stepmother proves the main source of domestic cruelty. The stepsisters (Amber Lewis and Paola Hartley) always take their mother's side (when the three advance in unison, it's a tiny moment yet memorably amusing); but they aren't genuinely nasty. The program, following Prokofiev, calls them Skinny and Dumpy, but what's funny about them is physicality, not physique. They're clueless hoydens who know neither how to dance nor how to behave. It's a rare choreographer who can make good jokes out of feckless dancing: the stepsisters, each dancing a solo, cause rising waves of laughter with their rapid repetitions of traveling jumps and hops. They're dismissive of Cinderella the kitchen girl; but Cinderella the ballroom ballerina they follow with abject awe and even devotion. The touching beauty of Mr. Andersen's heroine lies in manners and feeling. When the Dancing Master shows the stepsisters some steps, Cinderella does them too, exquisitely, though nobody pays attention. When she arrives in the ballroom in her tutu, she takes the Prince's hand and walks a few steps with him; but he must give that hand to her three times before she has sufficient confidence to leave the room with him. When he arrives in the kitchen with the shoe she dropped and tries it on her stepsisters, Cinderella drops the other shoe by accident and runs away in painful embarrassment. The couple's recognition scene, movingly phrased to the music, begins as he lovingly sees the two shoes are a pair and then turns, without thought for her kitchen-maid attire, to find the girl he's been seeking. When they first dance a pas de deux, alone in the ballroom, there's no colossal bravura, no huge lifts. The duet keeps returning to the simple central image of their locked eyes and joined hands; finally they nestle together, her head on his shoulder as if she has found a home. In the final scene, when the kitchen fades and she returns as a ballerina into a transfigured world, that intimate head-on-his-shoulder image is how their next pas de deux starts. And Mr. Andersen's staging of the strokes of midnight is the best apart from Frederick Ashton's classic 1948 staging: the courtiers turn impersonal, slowly hemming Cinderella in, like moving walls.