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In Thou Swell company director Peter Martins ushers four crushingly elegant women into a swanky ballroom in the sky. They dance to favourites like This Can’t Be Love and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, tackling the show dance cum classical steps with fearless power. The women, despite their NYCB trademark stocky legs, high kicks and stumpy feet, know what entertainment means, yet with their taste and conviction raise every move to art. There are no hidden agendas with these dancers, nothing is internalised to create a spurious mystery. Every moment on stage is refreshingly complete. Martins delivers almost sufficient choreographic invention to justify the work’s length, but unfortunately not quite enough.

The outrageous Daniel Ulbricht has the shortest legs in classical ballet, but enough chutzpah to win the US Presidential election. He shamelessly mugged his way through Tarantella, bouncing boyishly about like a rubber ball while inflicting terrible damage on his tambourine. He took the coarse art of upstaging his partner, brilliant Ashley Bouder to previously unimagined lengths - and brought the house down.

Russian émigré dancer and choreographer Balanchine knew his professional future in his adopted home lay in the fusion of two artistic cultures, Imperial ballet and US contemporary jazz. Western Symphony was his definitive, if crude way of proving it can be done. To an arrangement of traditional American tunes like Red River Valley and Oh Dem Golden Slippers in a film set of a saloon façade against rolling desert, Balanchine combined dance clichés from both. Bar floosies in rank defining colour coded tutus dance with men straight out of Oklahoma! While in the opening Allegro Nilas Martins was about as full of fun as this weekend’s British rail timetable, Justin Peck in Rondo judged his camp rhinestone cowboy to perfection.

Folk dance docidos and classical grand pas deux are all cheerfully sent up and the curtain falls on an exuberant cast whirling themselves giddy.

None of the appeal of Jerome Robbins’s iconic 1957 take on Romeo and Juliet transported to rival New York street gangs, has been lost over the past half century. Robbins’s unique recreation of the frenzy, the lyricism and bottomless energy of the world’s greatest love story are re-defined by the NYCB dancers. To the driven thrust of Leonard Bernstein’s score, the lovers Tony (Benjamin Millepied) and Maria (Faye Arthurs) were beautiful, Georgina Pazcoguin as Puerto Rican Maria was sensational while the company can only be faulted for being too perfect. The finale was Somewhere There’s a Place For Us, with the whole body of dancers addressing the audience. After such a breathtaking evening of talent, energy and stamina, it was a poignant moment to pay tribute to exemplary exponents of the art whose presence on stage is so heartbreakingly transient.