The final week of American Ballet Theatre’s Metropolitan Opera season brought forth a new Cinderella, Stella Abrera, in James Kudelka’s ballet set to Prokofiev’s haunted score. Ms. Abrera made her debut last Wednesday night, partnered by guest artist Guillaume Côté, who created the role at the National Ballet of Canada premiere in 2004. I saw their second performance together a night later.

Like Julie Kent, who danced the ballet’s premiere at ABT last year and again last week, Ms. Abrera is a long, lanky Cinderella. Both dancers are disconcertingly chic in the first act. Their interpretations here are not the classic incarnation of Cinderella, but may fit in with Mr. Kudelka’s and designer David Boechler’s conception, in which the fable becomes a pretext for an exercise in art deco elongation and elegance.

Watching Ms. Abrera go through her Act I paces, I couldn’t help but try to make sense of Mr. Kudelka’s rendition of the character of Cinderella herself. Throughout Act I, this Cinderella could be an adolescent having an identity crisis: When she watches the fairies dance, reclining in her chair insolently, she is indeed very much the teenager.

Much as Cinderella does herself, Ms. Abrera came into her own in the ballroom scene, where her performance transcended chic, and proved stylish in every sense of the word. It was as a demonstration of balletic polish as well as an evocation of manners and attitude. She wove deftly and dreamily through the waltzing couples, and handled the fast arabesques in her ballroom solo confidently. Ms. Abrera is an observant dancer. When she danced the Lilac Fairy in ABT’s new “Sleeping Beauty” earlier in the season, she projected magisterial authority by remaining unhurried in every step. A tone of the several performances I saw her give, she let energy flow sequentially through her arms to a degree I’d never seen in this role except in a 1974 video of the Kirov Ballet’s Alla Osipenko. Mr. Kudelka’s Cinderella isn’t as weighty a role as the Lilac Fairy, but it gives the dancer a lot of time onstage and Ms. Abrera made good, and, yes, observant, use of it.

As he did last year with ABT, when he partnered with Xiomara Reyes in this “Cinderella,” Mr. Côté demonstrated that he has everything going for him as the upper-crust swain of Mr. Kudelka’s imagining. Mr. Côté manifested the classic danseur noble virtues as well as the period note that Mr. Kudelka is pursuing. He brought to his performance a real note of Park Avenue/Park Lane swank: He can shoot his cuffs with the best of them. He was visibly spellbound at the ball, and his meeting with Ms. Abrera had a magical inevitability. In his Act III forays around the globe to find Cinderella, his aerial sprints almost made the enormous Met stage look small. Mr. Kudelka certainly knows how to construct a duet, but when Prokofiev’s music starts to get clamorous midway through Cinderella’s two duets with the Prince, Mr. Kudelka responds with overly constructed, overly tricky passages. As a result, a lot of the partnering that Mr. Côté has to do is frenetic and strenuous, but he makes virtuoso partnering as well as solo moves look like dancing rather than exertion.

Although the big picture painted by Mr. Côté was as wonderful as a year ago, the micro details of finish and recovery were slightly askew, perhaps simply because he was giving his second performance in 24 hours, or perhaps because Mr. Côté has been guest starring around the world over the past year.

At Thursday’s “Cinderella,” the fairies were the same as they had been at the first performance last Monday, with the exception of Kristi Boone, who replaced Zhong-Jing Fang as Twig. Both Ms. Boone and Ms. Fang have authentic individuality and made this sashaying solo their own as much as they had the “Sleeping Beauty” fairies they’d danced earlier in the season.