In La Fille Mal Gardée ( " The Badly Watched Daughter " ), which is the oldest surviving work in the ballet repertoire, the widow Simone wants her daughter, Lise, to marry Alain, the doltish son of her wealthy neighbor Thomas, but Lise has her eye on handsome peasant Colas. These days, the story looks like a metaphor for embattled arts organizations everywhere. Will Lise be allowed to wed her true love, or will she have to marry for money? Fortune is on her side: she weathers the storm that disrupts the ballet’s harvest celebration, and her reward is a rainbow and a pot of gold.

As it stages La Fille at the Wang Theatre, Boston Ballet must be wondering whether it too will find a pot of gold once the current economic storm clouds clear. The company’s financial difficulties have been well documented by the Globe and the Herald. Some 20,000 fewer Nutcracker tickets were sold this past holiday season, and $800,000 less was taken in. Eleven administrators and teachers were laid off, and the final four performances of the season-ending Romeo and Juliet were cancelled. The 2003-2004 schedule has been restructured: apart from The Nutcracker, there will be just 42 Boston Ballet performances as against 60 this season. There will be no Tuesday or Wednesday performances, and the Wang Theatre balcony will be closed.

None of this should come as a surprise. Although Boston Ballet has been billed in recent years as the fourth-largest ballet company in America, its endowment is a paltry $4 million. Houston Ballet has a reported endowment of $45 million; San Francisco Ballet’s has been put as high as $80 million. What’s more, Boston Ballet’s contributed income, about $5 million a year, amounts to barely 23 percent of the company’s annual $22 million budget. No performing organization that has to earn 77 percent of its income through ticket sales can maintain itself at a major level. For years, Boston Ballet has beaten the odds by staging a Nutcracker that was seen by more people — some 140,000 — than any other. Now that Christmas goose is running out of golden eggs.

Unlike Lise, the company has been well watched (all those empty seats you see are deceptive — New York City Ballet would have trouble filling the Wang Theatre), but it has not been well provided for. The arts in Berlin receive far greater support than they do in Boston, yet the Swan Lake I saw at Berlin’s venerable Staatsoper earlier this month was inferior to Boston Ballet’s in every way. Boston seems not to appreciate its good fortune: many bigger American cities would be thrilled to have this company. But how long can Boston Ballet survive on chicken feed?

Certainly the current production deserves a gold ring. La Fille Mal Gardée premiered in Bordeaux in 1789, under the title Le ballet de la paille, ou Il n’y a qu’un pas du mal au bien ( " The Ballet of Straw, or It’s Only a Short Step from Bad to Good " ), before making its way to London in 1791, Russia in 1818, Paris in 1827, Berlin in 1864, and America in 1937. Boston Ballet’s previous production, in 1983, was a shortened in-house effort by Bruce Wells; this time out the company is staging the now standard 1960 Frederick Ashton version, and it’s done full justice to his exquisitely intelligent, funny creation. The front drop that’s revealed during the overture describes a pastoral idyll: fields of grain and pasturage with cattle and sheep, a village with church (the focal point), a distant windmill; in the foreground, the instruments of work having been put aside, there’s a picnic basket with water jug and bottle of wine. Yet it’s identified as an idea (rather than a reality) by the flanking red theater curtains, one side adorned with a white dove (Noah’s?), the other with a less-than-classic female statue en déshabille (talk about mal gardée).

The overture itself is the first of Ashton’s many witty jokes: it begins as a grand royal entrance (here played to the hilt, as it absolutely should be, by Jonathan McPhee and the Boston Ballet Orchestra) before dissolving into birdsong. When the drop rises, we’re in Simone’s farmyard, with the house and garden on one side and a dairy and hayloft on the other; it’s dawn, and the peasants wake and go off to work (something you won’t find in many ballets) even before the cock crows. We know that for a fact, because after they leave, a rooster and four hens emerge from their chicken coop and perform what has to be ballet’s only poultry pas de cinq. Ashton is reminding us that we’re not so far removed from these endearing chickens, and the sight of a rooster with four hens does not augur well for Colas’s fidelity to Lise.

When Lise and Colas do appear, moreover, they have to earn their wedding day. They bill and coo like doves rather than chickens, and they’re attuned to each other’s feelings. Yet Ashton leaves you wondering how they’ll manage once the curtain falls. Colas is a mere farmworker, and we don’t actually see him do any work; his stage time is spent romancing Lise and partying with the peasants. And Lise, to judge by her perfunctory attempts at sweeping and churning, will never be much of a homemaker. Their one hope, it seems, is to share in and inherit Simone’s considerable holdings, and for that they’ll need her blessing.

But a good marriage wants more than money, and Ashton uses Lise’s pink ribbon as an extended metaphor for the creation of a relationship. Lise starts off the sequence solo, like a rhythmic gymnast, launching the ribbon into space and imagining Colas at the other end. When Colas appears to take up that end, Lise plays the role of a cart pony, with Colas playfully whipping her on, and then they exchange roles; you wonder whether they’ll ever get to sit together behind a real pony like the one that Thomas owns. Later they entwine themselves in the ribbon to create a cat’s cradle, as if to show they could take care of a baby. And in the harvest scene, pink ribbons become Lise’s physical connection with the world around her: a human Maypole, she’s held up on pointe by the taut ribbons as her friends circle around her.

More than metaphor goes into making a relationship, however. Ashton’s choreography — for every character, not just Lise and Colas — is all about footwork, and it’s intensely physical, like real farmwork. The corps steps are not technically demanding, but they call for teamwork. As the evening progresses, you can see a community in the act of creation.

The one commercially available videotape of La Fille Mal Gardée is a 1989 Australian Ballet performance under the ægis of aborted Boston Ballet artistic director Maina Gielgud; it’s sharper and, in its technique, funnier than this production, but this one is more romantic and more moving. The romance starts with the music: you almost have to hear the serviceable account by Noel Smith and the State Orchestra of Victoria to appreciate how Jonathan McPhee has raised a mundane pastiche score to the level of Beethoven’s Pastorale. In Australia, the moment when Simone opens the shutters on Colas is a jolt; here it’s subtly integrated.

There was vintage dancing, too, in Thursday night’s quartet of major roles. Pollyana Ribeiro’s Lise has both fairy-tale-princess attitude and the chops to back it up, as in the precisely delineated series of sauté-passé moves and cabrioles in her harvest-scene solo; and she’s exquisite in her second-act marriage-and-mother mime, as well as in the moment when Lise turns her back on Colas while extending her bare arm for him to kiss. Simon Ball’s Colas is a romantic icon, handsome and sensitive, but sometimes the hard work seems, well, hard work: McPhee appeared to slow down for Colas’s demanding solo (tours-jeté, double tours, manège with double tours) in the harvest-scene pas de deux, and in the diagonal run that caps their duet his footwork lagged behind Ribeiro’s. Paul Thrussell’s Simone (this role is traditionally performed en travesti) all but steals the show from Lise and Colas with his Danny Kaye posturings and English music-hall riffs: this is a sophisticated essay on how a man plays a woman while letting us know that he’s really a man. As for Ilya Kozadayev, his Alain all but steals the show from Simone, with his childlike need to connect, especially with the audience (think Jerry Lewis). Alain’s Lise substitute is a red umbrella that he hides under at times but more often rides like a hobby horse; Kozadayev’s bronco antics are as heroic as Baryshnikov’s in ABT’s legendary Nutcracker.

For Friday, the company had advertised Sarah Lamb and Gaël Lambiotte as Lise and Colas, but instead we got Adriana Suárez and Yury Yanowsky, amid rumors that Lambiotte and his significant other, Sabine Chaland, had returned to Europe after learning that Chaland would not be named a principal for next season. (Lambiotte and Chaland came to Boston Ballet in the fall of 2001 as principal and soloist; you could make a reasonable argument both for and against Chaland’s promotion to principal, and of course we’re in the realm of speculation, but it’s unfortunate that they felt it necessary to depart in the middle of the season.) Suárez is a complex Lise, more childlike with her mother than Ribeiro, but also more mature with her lover. She’s more grounded, even dancelike, in her footwork (it’s especially noteworthy in the second act’s tambourine dance) but not as unpredictably spontaneous. Yanowsky, who’s looking particularly trim and fit, started nervously Friday, falling out of his first two tours en l’air before pulling himself together for the grand pirouette à la seconde/attitude/passé sequence; he was looser and better Saturday afternoon. His harvest-scene manège flows like wine, and he’s a solicitous partner for Suárez, evincing a roguish humor in the harvest-scene trio with Alain. Chris Budzynski’s Alain is straighter and less over-the-top than Kozadayev’s — which could work better for some viewers. The Friday scene stealer was Viktor Plotnikov as Simone. Unlike Thrussell, he never suggests that he’s not a woman, and he’s sexy as hell, whether he’s flirting with Thomas or stealing a glance in the mirror. By the end of the evening, I was wondering why Simone didn’t forget about marrying Lise to Alain and try to snag Thomas for herself.

Saturday brought Joel Prouty as Alain, midway in foolery between Kozadayev and Budzynski, but growing in pathos in the second act, when he’s rejected in favor of Colas; his stricken look when he holds up the engagement ring with no finger to put it on is worthy of Farmer Boldwood in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. Chris Budzynski’s Simone is the dowager to Plotnikov’s diva, a little older, a little less pretty, a little more restrained in her attentions to Thomas, but not without pride or feeling.

Ashton’s ballet is a good match for Boston Ballet’s performing style in that both are feathered with felicities. The score provides grand-entrance music across the board, for Thomas and Alain but also for the harvesters when they come to collect their pay in the second act; there’s a side-splitting moment (underlined by McPhee) in the harvest scene when the villagers bow for what they think is the arrival of Thomas and Simone and instead the rooster and hens enter. The rooster (Budzynski, Prouty, and Kozadayev, all excellent) is more than Alain or Simone can handle; even Colas seems sexually intimidated. There are fine performances by Raymond Lukens and Robert Moore as Thomas, and Toasted Oats as Thomas’s cart pony (yes, there’s a live horse on stage) never puts a hoof wrong. The corps is, as usual, exuberant and winning. The interior of Simone’s farmhouse is a story in itself: framed portraits of a prize bull, a prize ram, and a prize fish; hams, rosemary, garlic, and sausages hanging from the rafters along with the laundry; what looks like a man’s hat and cloak (the late Monsieur Simone?); a " Vente " ( " Auction " ?) poster. And as the villagers exit, you can hear them trilling the tune that Jean Dauberval’s original cast sang, the tune whose lyrics gave the ballet its original title: " Il ne faut désespérer de rien/Il n’y a qu’un pas du mal au bien " ( " One needn’t ever despair/It’s only a short step from bad to good " ). Maybe that should be Boston Ballet’s motto.