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And so it was. In today's company, LeCrone's a rare exotic: she looks like a Balanchine dancer. Her proportions, sleek and long of neck and limb, were once ubiquitous at City Ballet, but have been mostly supplanted by more-compact silhouettes. But even for the Balanchine archetype, LeCrone's shape's far more angular than curvilinear: she's all edges and facets, which, like those of a well-cut gem, add brilliance to her simplest gestures. You see this especially in her face, which would be magnificently fierce and hawklike if she didn't looks so infectiously happy to be dancing.

Her Dewdrop began dramatically, revealed standing almost motionless, drawn up in a tight fifth, arms curled over her head as she gazed downwards, almost, for a moment, like that other famous dancing flower from Le Spectre de la Rose. Her hands came to life along with Tchaikovsky's waltz beat, like tendrils in a delicate breeze, and then she was off. Though LeCrone has a strong technique, and dazzled in a particularly tricky turning combination, she made her Dewdrop less an athletic tour de force than an animation of the music. LeCrone's verve sparkled in her challenging leaps and turns, but it was the untrammeled enthusiasm of her occasionally wild arms and hands which really enthralled me, as if she were using her arms to sing along with that famous melody, pumping them higher and higher with each of those three pounding, repeated notes which Tchaikovsky uses like thunderclaps. It's not often I come away from a Dewdrop recalling the liveliness of her hands, but LeCrone's, fluttering, singing, like the shoots and tendrils of a young flower, were a vision of spring on this particularly cold, snowy day.

For a debut, this was an unusually artful interpretation, despite occasional rough edges and wandering focus. As she's wont to do, LeCrone brought to mind the inimitable Wendy Whelan, who similarly made Dewdrop more about growth and renewal than amazing technique. (Although Whelan's truly irreplaceable, LeCrone might do very well in Whelan's repertory, as seen in her Agon debut.)

As for the other bon-bons in the Kingdom of Sweets, this was a pleasant but not spectacular show. After too many years of lithe, trim but decidedly unsexy Coffee girls, I had high hopes for the exotic, sloe-eyed Georgina Pazcoguin, and whenever she had a chance to stretch into Balanchine's juicier poses (ah, the floor-work), and ever-so-delicately vamp the audience, she was indeed every inch the spicy trifle Balanchine created as a reward for generations of otherwise-bored husbands and fathers. (Coffee used to be a shirtless Arthur Mitchell sharing some luxuriant moments with a hookah, perhaps not the stimulant of choice for young, impressionable audiences.) However, the conductor, Fayçal Karoui, reverting to his earlier form, rushed Pazcoguin throughout, and what might've been a great Coffee was merely enjoyable. These days City Ballet seems to have a bottomless supply of short men who have tremendous jumps, as shown by Troy Schumacher's Tea. Giovanni Villalobos coped nicely with a fast-paced Candy Canes, and the veteran soloist, Jennifer Tinsley-Williams, was a safe and sweet Marzipan shepherdess (which is actually more difficult technically than Dewdrop).

The strong and diminutive Ana Sophia Scheller made a dandy Sugar Plum fairy, wielding her wand with ease in her long solo, but when matched with an indifferent Gonzalo Garcia in the pas de deux, she was a bit more discomfited. While Garcia's certainly handsome, he was an inattentive Cavalier, and depressingly sloppy in his short solo. He seemed hardly to be the dancer I remembered flying through Ballo della Regina three years ago. I suppose some presents, once unwrapped, can't be stuffed back under the tree no matter how much one might want to.