I can die happy now. I've seen Georgina Pazcoguin's debut as Anita in Jerome Robbins' West Side Story Suite. and it was all I'd hoped it would be. She was in her glory Saturday, belting out "America" and dancing like Chita Rivera's big sister. Pazcoguin was every inch the dark and fiery Latina, twisting her shoulders and torso in about five directions at once, popping her kicks with a fillip as if she banging the cymbals with her jazzily shod foot, and gayly swishing her skirts as earlier generations clacked castanets. It was an electric performance, and if her singing voice was sometimes more energetic in the pursuit of the right pitch than its capture, her performance brimmed with Anita's sass and pride. I've seen other dancers have great fun with Anita, but Pazcoquin delivered Broadway-caliber sizzle. "Smoke on your pipe and put that in," indeed.

West Side Story Suite came at the end of the aptly named program, "American Songs and Dances," which City Ballet presented for the first time Saturday night. The singing, some from the dancers themselves, ranged from Lounge Lizard to sublime, Rodgers and Hart to Charles Ives to Leonard Bernstein. The choreographic quality didn't always live up to the music, but when it did, as in Robbins' Ives, Songs and parts of West Side Story Suite, it was mesmerizing.

The evening started with the return of Peter Martins' ill-considered tribute to Richard Rodgers from 2003, Thou Swell. Although Martins chose selections by Rodgers and Hart rather than the sunnier anthems of Rodgers and Hammerstein, it's as if he couldn't hear the edge of bitterness in Hart's lyrics, or perhaps he didn't want to. It seems Martins had a Vision upon which he'd let nothing, especially the music he was supposedly celebrating, intrude. So at no little expense, he commissioned a vast Art Deco nightclub set from Robin Wagner, and drop-dead gorgeous Art-Deco costumes from Julius Lumsden, complete with specially designed Manolo Blahniks for the ladies. Although some of the songs in Thou Swell do date from the Twenties, the Art Deco glamor celebrated in the ballet's design was dead and gone by Rodgers and Harts' heyday in the great Depression. It's strangely incongruous to see these immaculately turned-out Fitzgeraldesque Beautiful People cavorting to songs from a grittier time. Even more anachronistic is the inclusion of a single Rogers and Hammerstein number, the relentlessly chipper "Getting to Know You."

The musical arrangements were profoundly lush, with the orchestra (led by Fayçal Karoui) augmented by an onstage jazz trio and singers Betsy Wolfe and Mike McGowan, who sent me cringing as they shamelessly oversold their songs, bringing too much to mind Bill Murray's kitschy lounge singer from Saturday Night Live. In this cast, the lead couples were Yvonne Borree and Nilas Martins, Darci Kistler and Jared Angle, Faye Arthurs and Charles Askegard and Sara Mearns and Tyler Angle. These were debuts for the Mearns, Arthurs and the Angles, with Arthurs and Tyler Angle substitutions for Maria Kowroski (who has missed a few performances) and Amar Ramasar. After each woman's grand entrance, their tuxedoed partners relieve them of their stunning black-and-white Deco coats, to reveal their truly spectacular dresses, none more so than Kistler's dazzling traceries of cream-colored, pleated fabric. Although Thou Swell begins promisingly enough, it soon becomes depressingly clear that Martins really can't carry off the conceit of this ballroom-in-the-sky with much depth or conviction. There's a lot of cleverness in the ballroom duets, but little sense of the relationship between each couple, or more than a superficial sense of their personalities. The men, in particular, leap about in what look to be out-takes from Balanchine's far better Who Cares? There's also an echo of Liebeslieder Walzer in how the women change from their Blahniks into toe shoes, but only an echo. For Balanchine, ballroom dancing was a window into his characters' souls; for Martins, it's a vehicle for snazzy cliches.

Illuminating the stage as much as Mark Stanley's lighting, or the enormous mirror Wagner hangs over the stage (I still wait in vain for the June Taylor dancers), was the metaphorical light of the torch being passed to a new generation at City Ballet. (Forgive me, but it's a political year.) Sara Mearns was spectacular in her tight black dress with the flaming scarlet lining, a simmering sexpot not quite at the boil. Although blonde and curvier than most City Ballet dancers, Mearns also has a withdrawn, introspective quality which makes this sophisticated siren a stretch for her, yet all the more intriguing for her slight air of reserve. Tyler Angle, who's having a great season, was as dashing and bouyant as Martins allowed his cut-out men to be. (I also hope he didn't hurt his wrist when a slight spill while bounding up the stairs to his banquette led him to bang it on a chair.)

Faye Arthurs, destined to appear twice this evening in a white dress with red trim, was a cold beauty with Askegard, although an appealing one. Yvonne Borree, in an odd red dress that looks as if she had wrapped herself in both a picnic blanket and a wicker picnic basket (or so her bodice appeared) was alternately wan and overly hyper back at the ballet's premiere, and the years have only made her more so, and her dancing had the desperate feel of a drowning person grabbing at straws. (I'm hoping to see this role transformed by Janie Taylor next week.) While Martins has looked particularly trim since he's returned to the stage, he still has a stolid style that, no matter how clean his technique or strong his partnering, makes him look oddly uninterested in his dancing. When he tries to compensate by being wild and crazy (as in Western) the results are usually unfortunate; I'm glad he didn't try here. As for Kistler, while she smiled like the Madonna and cranked up her personal reality distortion field, it wasn't enough to distract the eye from her sadly creaky dancing. Although she had flashes of her former impetuosity and the taking of startling risk (she still can snap off a quick double pirouette with no warning), by the ballet's end, she seemed increasingly tired, and increasingly reliant on Jared Angle, who's quietly inheriting Jock Soto's mantel as the Great Partner. This Angle, as always, was strong, understated and, for the most part, self-effacing, except when he usurped what used to be a bit of business for Martins, replacing the onstage pianist and pounding out a few bars of Rodgers.

As much as I'd wished it were otherwise, I couldn't stop noticing the artistic chasm between Mearns and Arthurs, young dancers with many years ahead of them, and Borree and Kistler, who've been around, well, many years longer. If Kistler and Borree look taxed by roles which were created on them only five years ago (and Martins is notorious for making roles which make Kistler look pretty without stressing her waning technique), then perhaps the handwriting really is on the wall.

I'm amazed to think that I've never seen Jerome Robbins' Ives, Songs. What a treat to see a Robbins ballet for the first time, only twenty years after its premiere. Made in 1988, ten years before Robbins death, Ives, Songs is an exercise in reminiscence and nostalgia. Although Robbins' own youth was far from the small-town New England of the first decades of the last century, as evoked by Ives, it's hard to shake the feeling that we're seeing Robbins musing on the earliest years of his life, in a kind of dancing Our Town. A genius of the theater, Robbins takes on what would've been a cliche in lesser hands by having an older dancer wander through remembered images of his youth. Last night this role was played (I can't say danced, as it has no dance steps) by Robert LaFosse in a miracle of subtle shadings and an old-fashioned three-piece suit. Made up to look a man in his seventies, LaFosse transformed not only his appearance, but his way of moving. With the slow and deliberate shifting of weight at each step favored by the halt and old, and ever-stiff arms and shoulders, LaFosse looked every inch an an old man lost in memories.

The exquisite musicianship accompanying Ives, Songs more than made up for Thou Swell's bombast. The fourteen songs are gems, poignant, evocative and rather mellow for Ives, sung with great refinement by Philip Cutlip, with Cameron Grant accompanying on piano. Kudos to City Ballet for printing the lyrics in the program, although Cutlip's clear enunciation hardly required them. The songs, some with texts by Ives, others set to poetry of the day, range from Longfellow's "The Children's Hour," recollections of a trip to the opera house, a couple's wedding waltz, hymns, patriotic exhortations looking back to the First World War, and melancholy finalities, as in "The Incantation," set to a poem of Byron's. Ranging, as they do, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and together they evoke a remembered world of surprising depth.

While Ives, Songs can be Robbins' farewell look at yet another community, like the aristocrats of Dances at a Gathering, or, most famously, the Jets and Sharks, it's not insignificant that he made this work a year after the death of Antony Tudor. With its glow of diffused nostalgia, Ives, Songs ventures into Tudor's Proustean realm of memory. It's not coincidental that the ballet begins with three young girls who could've stepped right out of Tudor's Pillar of Fire, in dresses by Florence Klotz which strongly recall costumes from Pillar. It doesn't matter whose past Robbins is recalling; he wasn't born when Ives wrote most of his songs, so for Robbins it's nostalgia for a time he never experienced. But it's nostalgia and memory themselves which are Robbins' subjects -- the experience of looking back at one's life as if through the wrong end of a telescope. By 1988, Robbins certainly lived in the company of ghosts; perhaps animating Ives' with a nod towards Tudor's was the closest he could come to addressing his own.

As with most of the Robbins' ballets in the repertory, Ives, Songs was lovingly staged and danced. Kathryn Morgan, Rachel Piskin and Stephanie Zungre were the three girls, soon joined by Adam Hendrickson, a bouncing Huck Finn in knickers, Troy Schumacher and Justin Peck, enacting the age-old drama of the first encounters of not-quite-children with the opposite sex, here the terrors of Schumacher in asking a girl to dance. After the children finally waltz together, the very grown-up couple of Dena Abergel and Jason Fowler waltz grandly from wing to wing, a coda anticipating, perhaps, the children's futures, or foreshadowing the ballet's transition to adult memories. In "He is There!" and "Tom Sails Away," Robbins turns his adolescent boys into soldiers, marching and leaping in formations both grand and sad, as the boys don pie-plate World-War-One helmets, and march to an upstage corner, each spinning and falling dead into the wings. ("Tom Sails Away" ends with an ironic quote of George M. Cohan's "Over There." It's a good thing Ives isn't writing today, he'd be sued into oblivion by Cohan's estate.)

There are two sepia-tinged duets, for Wendy Whalen and Charles Askegard, and Sara Mearns and Jared Angle, before the stage is filled with dancers who drift off, leaving La Fosse alone. It's not a surprise, yet Robbins' skill and La Fosse's subtle, earth-bound Ives figure makes it unspeakably poignant.

The evening ended with the aforementioned West Side Story Suite. While individual numbers, like the the "Dance at the Gym" or "Cool," are tremendously exciting, the awkward transitions with which some scenes end (a whistle blows, the dancers stop what they're doing, turn to face us, step backwards and bow) emphasizes that these are excerpts. If you get past that aesthetic rough edge, it's tremendous fun. Robbins and Bernstein -- what's not to like (please, don't mention The Dybbuk). Amar Ramasar debuted as Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, with such smoldering menace that I wondered how he could be so affectless playing the heavy in La Sonnambula. This night, Benjamin Millepied's Tony looked appropriately dreamy in "Something's Coming," and Faye Arthurs, again in a white dress with red trim, portrayed an innocent yet sensual Maria. Their first encounter at the gym, walking slowly towards each other along the footlights as the dance crashes around them, is still a perfect theatrical moment. Of course, they don't get to sing "Tonight" here. Damian Woetzel was an ageless wonder singing and dancing Riff, even if there were places he seemed to give up actually carrying the tune. In "America," Pazcoguin was joined by newcomer Gretchen Smith as Rosalia, the hapless friend who wishes to return to Puerto Rico. She was a fine foil for Pazcoguin, although driven a bit over the top, perhaps to compete with Pazcoguin's lightning bolts. While ballet dancers don't often get into rumbles, the men were frightening daredevils in the rumble. Ramasar was frighteningly thuggish in his knife fight with Woetzel. (Remind me never to criticize his dancing ever again.) The "Somewhere Ballet," where gang members unite in some imaginary, impossible Utopia, is still poignant, a vision of everything these kids' lives aren't.

As I skipped out a side exit from the State Theater I once again mused on the irony that much of the neighborhood glorified in West Side Story was demolished to make way for Lincoln Center, but not until after they filmed the movie on its doomed streets.

Abergel, Angle, J, Angle, T, Arthurs, Askegard, Borree, Fowler, Hendrickson, Kistler, La Fosse, Martins, Mearns, Millepied, Pazcoguin, Ramasar, Smith, Whelan, Woetzel