The children stole the show at the first “Nutcracker” of New York City Ballet’s five-week run on Friday night. They were in fine fettle, their high spirits subject to well-drilled discipline and professionalism.

“The Nutcracker” exists in three separate realms: the Christmas festivities in a bourgeois drawing room; the surrealistic battleground of Marie’s bedroom, where the Mouse King and the Nutcracker do battle, and the toothsome paradise of Act II’s Kingdom of the Sweets. Adults as well as children contributed to make the first act’s domesticity particularly convincing. Everyone onstage seemed to come to attention midway through the first act, during the Grossvater dance. Like the Farandole in Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty,” in which both peasants and aristocrats participate, the Grossvater reinforces dance as an organizing principle of comity and social coherence.

NYCB’s repertory doesn’t give its dancers many chances to perform character roles, so it sometimes seems as though the dancers view the few they’re given with some condescension, imbued as they are in Balanchine’s primacy of classical ballet vocabulary. But Jason Fowler and Dena Abergel treated their Act I pantomime roles as Dr. and Frau Stahlbaum with care, as well they needed to, since they are lynchpins of adult authority: host and hostess of the celebration, and the parents of Marie.

The adults in the dance-heavy roles, however, fared less well. The onerous obligation of negotiating highly technical parts the night after Thanksgiving proved an uphill battle for many of the grown-ups in charge of Act II divertissements.

Moments after the curtain rose on Act II, Maria Kowroski sailed out, greeting the child-angels in the kingdom, and her waywardly oblique head positions seemed to indicate that she was imagining her Sugar Plum Fairy this evening as a rather capricious doyenne. But soon after that, watching her list at port and starboard in her solo, it was clear that this wasn’t going to be a performance of informed interpretive choices as much as an attempt at technical survival.

There was no magic in the “Grand Pas de Deux” she danced with Charles Askegard. Indeed, Ms. Kowroski was saved by Mr. Askegard in passages in which she began an unsupported movement that was later completed with her cavalier’s assistance. Mr. Askegard’s solo in the coda, however, was sedentary. Ms. Kowroski rallied somewhat in her own coda solo.

While Ms. Kowroski may have been off form, Ashley Bouder as Dewdrop, leading the Waltz of the Flowers, was guilty of overkill. Ms. Bouder’s emphatic way of presenting the rubato native to Balanchine’s musical phrasing is something of a trademark of hers, and can be very exciting indeed. But when she doesn’t seem fully engaged, and starts punching out her effects, her ballistic attack can seem mannered. On the other hand, the taut stretch of her legs and feet in her diagonal of aerial rond de jambes was a model of technical perfection.

Luxurious casting was provided by assigning Rachel Rutherford and Abi Stafford to dance as Ms. Bouder’s demi-soloist deputies. They weren’t at their best, either, but their performances exhaled a more intoxicating floral perfume than Ms. Bouder at this performance.

Contributing to the enduring fascination of Balanchine’s “Nutcracker” are the embedded remnants of the Ivanov-Petipa “Nutcracker,” in which Balanchine danced as a child at the Mariinsky Theatre in pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg. Balanchine said that the Little Prince’s mime speech in Act II, in which he explains to all present the way he vanquished the Mouse King in Act I, was lifted from the Mariinsky’s production.

Another artifact of the imperial “Nutcracker” is the Candy Canes’ divertissement for children and a lead man. The role was danced here by Tom Gold who, as always, inspired confidence with his hoop work. And Daniel Ulbricht as Tea handled his Chinaman clichés and torpedo sallies with nonchalance.

Until December 30 (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).