There are not one but two belles of the ball in Ronald Hynd’s “The Merry Widow,” which returned to American Ballet Theatre on Monday. Julie Kent danced the title role of Hanna Glawari, reunited with her long-lost love, Count Danilo, and Xiomara Reyes was Valencienne, married to a doddery ambassador (Victor Barbee, aged up substantially), but carrying on with a French attaché (Gennadi Saveliev), who personifies a much younger and more vigorous specimen of male.

While “Merry Widow” gives both ballerinas a lot to do, however, it doesn’t tax them technically. Nothing in ballet is easy — indeed, the simpler something is technically, the more thrown into high relief its stylistic particulars become — but this ballet is something of a ballerina’s holiday.

Mr. Hynd choreographed it to John Lanchbery’s arrangement of the original Lehar operetta for the Australian Ballet in 1975, and it entered ABT’s repertory in 1997. “Merry Widow” is set in Paris, but is heavy with the flavor of the mythical Middle European kingdoms that ruled operetta at the turn of the century. Here, the kingdom of Pontevedro is bankrupt, which is why it is so essential that the Widow keep her fortune by not remarrying to a foreigner. She is thus reunited with the Count, whose dalliance with her long ago isn’t known to the diplomatic meddlers who put them back together.

“Merry Widow” gives the men in the corps de ballet much to do, but their roles are mostly not hyper-technical. In particular, the shorter men bumble around comically — especially Aaron Scott as a waiter at Maxim’s who trips carrying the champagne, and Mikhail Ilyin as a fussbudget maitre d’. The taller ones practice their hand-kissing, and dance equivalents of the phrase “Enchanté, madame.” While Continental gallantry doesn’t come as second nature to the ABT fraternity, some of the corpsmen were much more convincing blades-about-town than others.

There are better things ABT could be doing with its time than this ballet, but while “The Merry Widow” could be improved — more imaginatively conceived and presented — it could also be a lot worse. Mr. Hynd has had wide experience in the ballet buffa and demi-caractère genres, which were well represented in the Royal Ballet repertory during the years he danced there. He calls upon his choreographic heritage liberally here. The choreography is more than serviceable, and there is fun to be had.

Jose Manuel Carreño was fine as the amorously adventurous but not overly bright Count. But the major male pyrotechnical display goes to Joseph Phillips, leading the Pontevedrian braves in a quasi-nationalistic dance that is more classical showpiece than anything else. They put it over neatly.

Ms. Kent took advantage of an Act 1 memory duet, in which the Count dreams of the village maiden she’d been when they first loved each other, a rather needlessly protracted Act 2 character dance motif, and the requisite romantic swooning and longing necessary to give us a heroine of substance. Both Mr. Saveliev and Ms. Reyes were able to convincingly switch from mischievous slapstick to erotic abandon when called upon.

Mr. Barbee held down his senior place in the comic hierarchy, and two junior members of the Pontevedrian diplomatic corps, Craig Salstein and Jared Matthews, kicked up their heels with gusto. If Carlos Lopez would take down the excitability one notch, his performance as Njegus, the ambassador’s private secretary, would be an ideal farcical characterization.