AFTER all the hue and cry over mechanical malfunctions in Los Angeles, it was a relief when the New York premiere of “Grendel” arrived Tuesday night without a hitch at Lincoln Center.

All its computerized technology worked like a dream – including that much-publicized, 18-ton revolving wall – providing a Julie Taymor night of theatrical magic.

But the problem with Taymor’s opera, said to have cost $3.1 million, is that it is not actually by Taymor, but by her partner, composer Elliot Goldenthal.

A spectacle it is. As an opera, where the score is virtually everything – it’s, well, a really magnificent spectacle.

Taymor, who did Disney’s “The Lion King” and the Metropolitan Opera’s “The Magic Flute,” takes “Beowulf” – a 1,000-year-old Anglo-Saxon classic telling of Grendel, a man-eating monster, and the hero who eventually slays him – and runs with it.

Here, following John Gardner’s 1971 novel “Grendel,” the story is told from the point of view of that archetypal outsider, the monster himself. Fascinating – but as put in the libretto by Taymor and poet J.D. McClatchy, this approach to the legend is neither persuasive nor dramatic.

Even sympathetic monsters are bad news.

You can tell the man-eating Grendel, as a mysterious Dragon does here, that his function toward Man is to “scare him to glory,” and I’m still on the side of Man, the potentially eaten.

Libretto aside, Goldenthal’s music is as anonymous as was his other dismal major theatrical score, American Ballet Theatre’s dreary “Othello.”

Smoothly conducted by Steven Sloane, the music unspools underneath what seem like superimposed vocal lines, leaving the singers sounding as characterless as the orchestral soundtrack.

It might be fine, in short pungent doses, for a movie. But it fails as an opera, even though, as a theatrical piece, “Grendel” remains a lot of fun – a feeling man’s Cirque du Soleil.

Taymor is in her element, rounding up her usual cast of wondrous collaborators – set designer George Tsypin, costume designer Constance Hoffman, puppet designer Michael Curry – and spinning a theatrical beauty out of sheer illusion.

The cast includes a glamorous and wide-toned Dragon from Denyce Graves; dancer Desmond Richardson, silent, steely and stealthy as the hero Beowulf; and a marvelous bass-baritone, Eric Owens, who takes the marathon role of Grendel into a dimension of shabby grandeur that is so perfect, the opera could have been built around him.

Perhaps it was.

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GRENDEL

Lincoln Center Festival 2006, New York State Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 721-6500. Performances tonight, Saturday and Sunday.