Note to Self: A Good Pair of Shoes Always Ends Up Paying for Itself

James Kudelka manages something fairly remarkable in his version of “Cinderella,” which American Ballet Theater performed on Tuesday in the first of a seven-performance run at the Metropolitan Opera House. He succeeds in creating a fairy-tale ballet entirely devoid of charm, a “Cinderella” that is for neither children nor adults and that somehow misses nearly every theatrical moment in the familiar story.

Choreographed for the National Ballet of Canada in 2004 and first performed by Ballet Theater in 2006, the work offers Cinderella (Gillian Murphy on Tuesday) as a somewhat less downtrodden, if conventionally sweet, character. She is ignored rather than oppressed by her stepmother and stepsisters. (Mr. Kudelka omits the father, and thus an element of pathos.) And the final garden-party wedding scene suggests a transformation that is less rags to riches than dowdy to happy housewife.

But Mr. Kudelka doesn’t have a strong conceptual or dramatic arc to substitute for the tamping down of the wish-fulfillment elements of the story. (Quite aside from the girl-meets-prince aspect, Cinderella’s happy ending should be a highly satisfactory triumph over the cruelty she has undergone at her family’s hands.)

The costumes and décor (by David Boechler) are more or less 1920s inspired, but there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for that apart from aesthetics. And while Mr. Kudelka half rejects the fairy-tale Cinderella, he embraces the idea of the clownish, cartoon family. The stepmother (Martine van Hamel) does nothing but teeter about tipsily, swigging from a bottle; the stepsisters follow the pattern set by Frederick Ashton’s 1948 version, with one shy and bespectacled, the other brazen and overbearing.

In the Ashton version the sisters are played by men in drag. Here they are women (Kristi Boone and Luciana Paris, my sympathies to them), but it would make little difference if they weren’t. Mr. Kudelka shows no aptitude for comedy other than slapstick, and once stepmama has wandered glassily across the stage twice and the shy sister has fallen over three times, that’s exhausted too.

That the Prince is a stock character is perhaps not the worst of the ballet’s problems. (Let’s not even get into the vegetable garden fairies or the pumpkin-headed men.) But it’s a sign of the choreographic blurriness of Mr. Kudelka’s work here that even the beauty of David Hallberg’s dancing couldn’t quite emerge from the muddle. His crystalline execution of fiendishly difficult jumps and turns in the second act should have drawn cheers, but Mr. Kudelka favors a start-stop-start-again approach that prevents the audience from ever being drawn into the dance or the emotions that it is trying to convey.

Ms. Murphy too is wildly hampered by this tactic. In Act I she seems to be forever bursting into dance only to sit down glumly with a dishrag, and although she presents a brave, high-spirited and sweet-natured heroine, she has little choreographic opportunity to develop her character.

To make matters worse, Mr. Kudelka seems intent on thwarting almost every one of Cinderella’s big moments. Aside from her glamorous pumpkin carriage arrival at the ball, this poor Cinderella has no magical transformation from servant garb to ballgown; she is forced to stand haplessly on a chair in underwear when the clock strikes midnight; the all-important loss of the slipper never registers; and, most criminally, when the shoe-fitting moment comes, she is hidden from sight by the prince’s entourage.

That there is no cathartic moment of revelation — that this shy, bedraggled girl is a true princess — seems emblematic of this muddled “Cinderella.” Mr. Kudelka’s fussy, complicated choreography features hideously difficult and uncomfortable-looking partnering and responds neither to the Prokofiev score’s darker elements nor to its lyricism. There were moments — the second act pas de deux, Ms. Murphy’s whirling third act solo, Mr. Hallberg’s dazzling jumps — in which the dancers made you forget the tedium of the material. But not even they could do it often enough.