PETROUCHKA

The romantic triangle of the Stravinsky ballet, inconstruable to young children--puppet Petrouchka loves the (puppet) ballet dancer, who spurns him for the Moor (puppet), who, spurned in turn, dispatches Petrouchka to heaven--is here presented as a very young picture book. The text under the framed picture on each facing page is a flat, terse, clumsily-written caption (""They watched an organ grinder begin to play; and everyone else came to listen, too. And to watch a girl with a triangle dance and pirouette to the music""); the pictures themselves, though not un-attractively done (and very attractively colored), have neither verve nor emotional conviction. The puppets are puppets here, but then so are the people in the crowd scenes that precede the performance. On the stage all this comes alive, and the action, whether fully intelligible or not, sweeps the audience along. Here it's inert--another instance of good intentions misdirected.