Alexei Ratmansky’s historical reconstructions—as strict as the archives allow and otherwise strikingly intuitive—have uncovered riches in ballets we thought we knew and even in classical style. His Sleeping Beauty woke up the lower legs to a cutting eloquence and the flattened characters to their individual temperaments. His Swan Lake shed its callow moral and became a love story that harbored many kinds of love. But more recently, with The Seasons and Harlequinade for American Ballet Theatre, the Kyiv native seemed to be scraping the bottom of the 19th-century barrel, as constrained as he was inspired by his sources. So it’s a relief that for this Coppélia in Milan, Ratmansky is letting loose. I can’t think of a better assignment for a choreographer with his deft comic touch, his wise way with character, and his ear, both subtle and wry, for music as gorgeous and various as Delibes’s, without whose precedent Tchaikovsky wouldn’t have bothered with ballet. It’s the dreary truth that most contemporary choreographers don’t have enough interesting steps in them for an evening-length story ballet; Ratmansky seems only to be getting started. —Apollinaire Scherr