Entertainment

Promising season has a fresh slate of grace

As the title sleepwalker in “La Sonnambula,” the excellent Janie Taylor keeps her audience wide awake.

Fresh casting at New York City Ballet made three classics seem born yesterday. Pale, ghostly Janie Taylor, who made her debut over the weekend in George Balanchine’s “La Sonnambula,” is such an inevitable choice as a sleepwalker that you don’t just love her performance, you feel as if it were already familiar, a feat of déjà vu.

The ballet, scored to a pastiche of themes from 19th-century opera composer Vincenzo Bellini, is a gothic tale of a poet who meets his ideal beauty — a mysterious woman holding a candlestick — with tragic results.

Taylor brings a wild urgency to the stage. Asleep, but moving restlessly in staccato motion, she can’t see the poet, but she can sense him. He’s played by Robert Fairchild, also new to his part, and who may be too wholesome to play a doomed romantic. Fairchild’s at his best when he first sees her race, unseeing, onto the stage. He’s driven to know more about this enigmatic woman in white, but curiosity is what kills the cat.

The rest of the show had fine debuts, as well as old hands looking refreshed. “Divertimento No. 15” is sublime, plotless Mozart with five ballerinas decked out in lemon-colored tutus. Ana Sophia Scheller got a shot at the third variation. She’s shorter than usual for its elegant balances and poses, but it’s a role for a glamour girl — and that’s what she is.

Cool blonde Lauren King is in the corps, but looks at home dancing the first variation among the soloists and principals. In a company that celebrates quirky extremes, her smooth capability isn’t easily pigeonholed, but she gets better every season.

Senior principal Wendy Whelan staged a mini-comeback in Christopher Wheeldon’s “Polyphonia,” a contemporary ballet set to thorny piano music. She originated her part a decade ago, so there’s been some wear and tear. But she looks rejuvenated, dancing with an otherworldly beauty in her moonwalk duets with Tyler Angle. Her limbs move slowly, like tendrils in zero gravity.

Larger-than-life Sara Mearns took a role originally made for a delicate waif and completely reinterpreted it. She dances a frail waltz before being abandoned to a dark stage. But with her determined attack, the moment seems both defiant and heroic.

Neither Taylor nor Mearns is yet slated for another outing in those parts; the ballets will have their casts shuffled as the season goes on. That’s why it pays to go more than once. Everything depends on who’s dancing.