Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a dizzy dance of a drama, meandering mystifyingly between May Eve and Midsummer Eve under a moon that goes from new to full swifter than arrow from the Tartar’s bow. Over here, you have a citizen comedy on the hot (in 1595) topic of whether a father has the right to choose his daughter’s husband, complete with interchangeable swains whose infatuations are as brief as lightning in the collied night. Over there, you have a merry band of May Game mummers whose rehearsal antics are even funnier than those of Shakespeare in Love. Here, there, and everywhere flit the play’s presiding Summer King and Queen, Oberon and Titania (often doubling as their mortal counterparts, Theseus and Hippolyta), fairy powerful but just as wrangling in love. And girdling the Earth in a mere 40 minutes is hobgoblin Puck, who’ll make an ass out of you if you don’t look sharp. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” he chortles, but for all Oberon’s smugness in diddling Titania out of the coveted changeling page, you might well wonder (along with Peter Brook in his Royal Shakespeare production of 1970 and Michael Hoffman in his 1999 film) what she and Bottom are up to in her flowery bower during the long stretch of act three scene two. For Bottom it was a most rare vision: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen . . . what my dream was.” Synæsthesia as a metaphor for transcendent sex?

Well, Bottom may be translated, but Midsummer hasn’t managed to hoof it as neatly as Shakespeare’s concurrent play about paternal prerogative, Romeo and Juliet. The Bard’s star-crossed lovers are blessed with Sergei Prokofiev’s darkly exalted 1936 ballet score; Midsummer has had to make do with the scant hour of incidental music that Felix Mendelssohn completed for Prussian emperor Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1843. In 1962, having scoured Mendelssohn’s œuvre for music with which to flesh out that score, George Balanchine created a 90-minute Midsummer Night’s Dream ballet full of fairy children. (He made no bones about putting friends and relations in theater seats.) Two years later, Sir Frederick Ashton made The Dream, an hour-long work using just the Midsummer music that, with no children, is more camp than cute. In 1986, adding Mendelssohn’s Die schöne Melusine Overture, then associate artistic director Bruce Wells choreographed a 70-minute Midsummer Night’s Dream for Boston Ballet whose tutelary spirit was its Puck. Boston audiences found little to reprehend: the work was reprised in 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2001. Now the company is “graduating” to the more demanding Balanchine version. Opening night, the moon was new but not full, and the hawthorn buds hadn’t quite bloomed.

Taking his structural cue from The Nutcracker, Balanchine devotes the hour-long first act to Shakespeare’s story and the half-hour second act to the nuptial rites, with a formal wedding march and divertissement and pas de deux preferred to “Pyramus and Thisby.” Shakespeare’s hempen homespuns are on barely long enough to be sent scurrying through bog and brake by Bottom’s ass; Hippolyta and her silver bow bound through the Acheron-shrouded Athenian wood in a blur of jetés and fouettés, but she and Theseus are otherwise spectators; the mortal lovers, apart from Hermia’s solo, portray themselves through gesture and mime. Balanchine’s focus is on Oberon and Titania: she has a duet with her “Cavalier” (a Balanchine invention who does not reappear) set to Mendelssohn’s Athalia Overture and he follows with a sequence of brisés volés and beats as gossamer as Mendelssohn’s Scherzo. Yet whereas both Ashton and Wells have Oberon and Titania kiss and make up to the sweet musk rose of Mendelssohn’s Nocturne, Balanchine lavishes this fairy song on Titania and Bottom. There’s no sex in their hopping and gamboling; Bottom is as enamored of provender as he is of petting, and when Titania takes to her shell bed, he curls up at her feet and not in her arms. And Puck, post–Arthur Mitchell at least, is more sprite (Walter Terry described him as “Mercury subjected to a hotfoot”) than satyr. Balanchine reserves the intertwining of ivy and elm for act two and the divertissement couple’s pas de deux, which he set to the Andante from Mendelssohn’s Sinfonia No. 9. The dance is as slow-footed and melodious as Theseus’s Spartan-bred hounds; Arlene Croce called its cantilena line “as perishable as anything in Divertimento No. 15.”

Wells’s enjoyable version played to the company’s strengths: good technique and better acting. Balanchine’s genius is released through the precise execution of classic steps; you have to make them look simple even when they’re not. Balanchine’s Oberon, who was choreographed on Edward Villella, must hop as light as bird from briar; last night Reyneris Reyes was a heavy plowman not entirely purged of mortal grossness, though you couldn’t fault his effort. (To judge by Arlene Croce’s remarks on New York City Ballet’s post-Balanchine productions and by the 1999 Pacific Northwest Ballet DVD of this work, he has plenty of company.) Lorna Feijóo does not have the long line — physical or musical — Titania wants, but she compensated with girlish spontaneity in the Bower scene and a doting delight in her lodestar-eyed Bottom that didn’t preclude a decided shake of the head when he begs for the tender shoots she’s holding behind her back. Suzanne Farrell writes of having had to acquire a cat to help her find her inner animal lover; Feijóo fanned the moonbeams from Bottom’s eyes if she had grown up with a pet donkey, or at least a stuffed Eeyore. Gabor Kapin’s Bottom was tops, especially when he found Titania in his arms and his head went up, perhaps hearing what no man has seen.