The renowned dance critic Arlene Croce once noted that Tchaikovsky’s score for Swan Lake was so “unrealizable” a vision that the best you could hope for from the ballet was to be thrown back on your imagination, which would make up the difference. But choreographer Alexei Ratmansky’s reconstruction from the Petipa-era notations for once closes that gap. This Swan Lake leaves stormy internality and loud worldliness to the music and proceeds on a human scale. The 2016 Zurich–La Scala coproduction, which Miami City Ballet alone has brought Stateside, is an intimate love story involving a desperate mother and attentive friends, not an allegory of good and evil. The characters have dimension, the dancing is cohesive and varied, and the Petipa-Ivanov choreographic genius shines, with dancers clustered like bouquets, props ingeniously deployed, and an infectious affection for all things female, naughty and nice. —Apollinaire Scherr