CINDERELLA

American Ballet Theatre at Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center at 65th Street. (212) 362-6000. Season runs through July 15.

OH well, back to the drawing board! And keep that Champagne uncorked, its celebratory bubbles intact.

For it was third-time unlucky for American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House over the weekend, when it premiered its latest lamentable attempt to find a dance-friendly, or even dance-acceptable, version of Prokofiev’s now-classic score, “Cinderella.”

ABT’s first effort came in 1983 when it staged a version with choreography by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Peter Anastos, and then in 1996 it made a second try, this time by Ben Stevenson.

The current production arrives, complete kit and caboodle, from the National Ballet of Canada, and consequently it represents, in my view, a quite extraordinary judgment call.

Presumably, this staging, with its limp, humorless and essentially characterless choreography by 50-year-old, Ontario-born James Kudelka, and ugly ’20s-style settings and costumes by David Boechler, had been vetted in Canada by ABT’s artistic staff, yet unfortunately not found wanting.

But, just for starters, even the story has been knocked senseless: For example, it is never suggested onstage that Cinderella is a stepdaughter; she could simply be a family servant. This is important.

Then, there is someone described on the playbill as Fairy Godmother – in the first cast on Friday night she resembled Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell; on Saturday afternoon she looked more like Disney’s Mary Poppins – but she is not, as in Prokofiev’s ballet, seen first as a beggar woman who rewards Cinderella for her generosity in contrast with the meanness of her two step-sisters.

Time and time again, Kudelka’s derivatively conventional and uninventive dances run contrary to the spirit of the music and the story outlined in the score by Prokofiev’s original 1945 librettist, Nikolai Volkov.

By far, the best version of the ballet I have ever seen – even better than Rostislav Zakharov’s Soviet original – is that by Frederick Ashton, first for Britain’s Royal Ballet but later staged worldwide, and ABT would have done well to have mounted that poetic yet brilliant version.

Oddly enough, ABT’s new production is at his infrequent best in the sequence depicting the prince’s search to match Cinderella’s slipper, which is omitted in Ashton’s version, possibly a telling coincidence because the effort to match Ashton has clearly weighed heavily on Kudelka’s artistically meager shoulders.

The designs by Boechler – a Canadian whose previous experience was in drama rather than ballet – were said to have been inspired by the Folies-Bergere decorator, Erte. But the unlikely settings look more as if Georgia O’Keefe had taken up designing cups and saucers.

Of course – and this is a formidable plus – the dancing was excellent. But when at ABT is it not? The company could dance Toronto’s suburban Yellow Pages and make it seem like a long-distance call to St. Petersburg. But that doesn’t mean it should have to.

The first cast, on Friday, featured a deliciously delicate Julie Kent as Cinderella partnered by an ebullient and stylish Marcelo Gomes as Prince Charming, while the second cast, a joyfully piquant Gillian Murphy as the rags-to-riches scullery maid matched by David Hallberg, dancing with aristocratic dazzle and looking snooty, was even better the following afternoon.

But who cared? Where was the fairy tale – where was the fun, the magic? A wooden armchair left onstage during the entire ballet was perhaps – who knows? – intended to suggest that the whole ballet might be just Cinderella’s dream. Dream? Nightmare, more like it!