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On May 1, principal dancers Benjamin Millipied and Janie Taylor performed the lead roles, a Romeo and Juliet this side of the shtetl, with an authentic pathos that made my heart thump. The ballet is set in the male-dominated world of the Kabbalah, a sect of rabbinical mystics devoted to receiving the Hebrew scripture’s esoteric significances. Three of City Ballet’s finest male soloists—Sean Suozzi, Amar Ramasar, and Antonio Carmena—and one of its corps members, Adrian Danchig-Waring, comprised the cabal. They ushered Millipied from unrequited love to the afterworld with a soaring muscular grace.

Dybbuk isn’t a ballet to bring the kids, unless they are very sophisticated and a little weird. Its oddness lurks in every corner thanks in part to Patricia Zipprodt’s Hassidic-meets-black lingerie costumes for the nine-member male cast (some of whom have black and red wings). While Millipied and Taylor wear the white of virginal love and press, prostate and scream their expressive limbs against each other and a cloud-covered sky care of Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s cyclorama, my eye increasingly lingered on the combination of white unitards under diaphanous full-length black tunics (topped by head gear to resemble a Hassidic boys’ nascent side curls) that the Olympian-looking male cast wore. Think Bauhaus meets boys club.

I couldn’t get Martha Graham out of my mind when this group waved their legs forward and back in a figure eights with flexed feet and with their arms interlaced at each other’s shoulders. It looked like Graham’s Greek tragedy choreography for her all-female choruses. Stealing is the sincerest form of flattery. Robbins, in 1974, must have had a good helping of Graham. They choreographed in the same city; they both had their demons. Graham had men trouble and took strength in dancing female heroines like Oedipus’s Jocasta. Robbins, formerly Rabinowitz, had forsaken his Jewish culture across the river in New Jersey for the bright lights and less moral ways of Broadway and ballet. And while Graham was more interested in choreographing for woman, Robbins’s genius focuses on men. When Danchig-Waring sprung repeatedly off the floor like it was moving underneath him and he was balancing nonetheless, his arms spread like a soaring eagle. Magnificent flight over a dark, shifting earth not kind to its creatures is the thematic crux of Robbins’s visually mesmerizing Dybbuk, a ballet that Robbins was never happy with or willing to revive in full during his lifetime.

As to Robbins Fancy Free and West Side Story Suite, they began and ended this long and rewarding City Ballet program, respectively. In a tango topped by lifts and locked eyes, Damian Woetzel and Tiler Peck in Fancy showed how a meeting between a sailor on leave and a girl with a night off can burn time. Their elegant, flirty, musical duet was intoxication itself, and when Peck jumped through Woetzel’s circle-shaped arms and he rotated her like a clock’s second-hand over his shoulders, I believed they has passed a full night together in a frisson of mutual desire. Guest artist Ethan Stiefel, care of American Ballet Theatre, didn’t inhabit as the second sailor the naturalness of Woetzel. When he entered the stage, he grimaced and wagged his tongue sideways like a parched dog. It was overkill. As the third sailor, Joaquin De Luz didn’t feel compelled to play to the crowd. He wowed them with his double tours that landed in a split, which said “No problem folks.”

West Side Story Suite, Robbins’s Romeo and Juliet ballet of Anglo-meets-Latino 1950s class struggle fame, is the flip side of Dybbuk. Not a step dangles incoherently nor does a section fail to forward the tightly-fashioned plot. The City Ballet dancers even sing, and in the case of Andrew Veyette, the leader of the Jets gang, and Gretchen Smith, one of the Sharks’s girls, the singing is welcomed. What doesn’t make the grade is City Ballet doing the mambo. With the exception of Amar Ramasar and Sean Suozzi, who can accent and jut their bones like jazz dancers, these young talents’ skeletons don’t know how to shake it down and put some bootie in their backsides. Maybe it’s because they don’t have much in the way of flesh. Skinny Christian Tworzyanski, nonetheless, made music out of his instrument. In the section “Cool,” Tworzyanski canoodled and slammed his gangly frame about like a teenager on the edge of manhood. Like a harmonica player who knows the essence of his playing, he poured his personality into his pucker.