On Saturday evening, a largely Russian audience on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn saw something it might have found frightening and repellent 20 years ago. Onstage at Brooklyn College, the St. Petersburg State Male Ballet performed both drag balletic parodies as well as new choreography by émigré Andre Ivanov. Rather than recoil, though, the audience embraced the performers.

The company, a popular institution in Russia, consists of eight men, and the troupe’s founder and director is Valery Mikhailovsky, one of the stars of Boris Eifman’s original company from 1977 until 1991.

Given the former Soviet Union’s intolerance of anything suggesting sexual ambivalence, Mr. Mikhailovsky’s success is a breakthrough. The first half of the program was Mr. Ivanov’s suite that played off of the current prominence in Russia of once proscribed Western popular entertainment — Vegas spectacle, music video, glam rock. To a Vangelislike score, we saw three men each sheathed in shiny neon body suits shown to be a single piece of fabric subsuming them à la Alwin Nikolais when they moved apart. They wore masks and thrashed about in a birdlike manner reminiscent of the sorcerer villain Von Rothbart in “Swan Lake.”

Dressed in chiffon tops with waist cinches, the men next performed Spanish-style stomps, kicks, and grand rond de jambes that showed off their rubbery facility, to the overture from Bizet’s “Carmen.” Then, the stage cleared and one man performed in a similar style to the Habanera.

More PVC costumes factored into the following number, in which the men looked like robots, sporting headdresses and executing a foot-dragging processional to Albinoni’s “Bolero.” Next came a group of men wearing spectral black, dancing on pointe, and grasping white violins, which they bowed with white streamers. When the lights went all the way down, the violins glowed in the dark, suggesting a Busby Berkeley production number.

Mr. Mikhailovsky, now 53, remains very much in the performing spotlight. He first appeared in a sketch in which he used the stage’s invisible fourth wall as a mirror, before which he primped and preened. He then reappeared at the end of the program’s first half, rather like Siegfried and Roy in black gaucho pants.

The second part was given over to drag balletic parodies, arranged by Mr. Mikhailovsky. A tiny man with Eurasian features performed many of the male roles and ably executed some pyrotechnics. His size was exploited at every turn, as in the excerpt from “La Sylphide” in which an enormous tam-o’-shanter was plopped atop his diminutive frame.

This suite of balletic excerpts concluded with Mr. Mikhailovsky in a feathered headdress, bare chest, and satiny slacks, performing a rather remarkable rendition of Fokine’s “Dying Swan.”

Perhaps next time it comes to New York, the St. Petersburg State Male Ballet will attract the multinational audience it deserves.

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Back in Manhattan, during American Ballet Theatre’s just-concluded City Center season, Mark Morris’s “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” suffered from being programmed following Balanchine’s “Symphonie Concertante.” The Balanchine ballet is a masterpiece, while “Drink to Me” is a charming bagatelle. It is a neophyte’s look at ballet made by Morris for ABT in 1988, when he was new to the ballet idiom. Mr. Morris’s canting and torquing of ballet vocabulary is the movement equivalent of jottings and doodlings made by an observer plopped Gulliver-like into the hothouse world of classical ballet. The Virgil Thomson piano pieces to which “Drink to Me” is performed, with their childlike singsong and mischievous forays up and down the octaves, are a perfect partner for Mr. Morris’s initiation into the ballet vernacular.

“Drink to Me,” which I enjoyed more when it opened the program last Wednesday night, was well cast at ABT, where the dancers’ determination to hone every angle and plane of Mr. Morris’s invention was palpable. Some of these dancers, like Maria Bystrova, we don’t see enough of, so the fleeting moments of high visibility bestowed to each dancer in the 12-member cast were especially welcome. At the same time, principal dancers like Gillian Murphy and Michele Wiles projected convincing enthusiasm in the ensemble camaraderie that emerges as a theme in Mr. Morris’s work.

During the final days of the season, it was also a pleasure to see ABT perform Antony Tudor’s “Dark Elegies.” ABT performs far too few works by Tudor nowadays, so “Dark Elegies,” which entered ABT’s repertoire in 1940, now reclaimed something of a novelty status.

What often seemed like boredom, bewilderment, or embarrassment on the part of ABT’s dancers when undertaking the previous Tudor revival, 2003’s “Pillar of Fire,”has been ameliorated by what seems like a concerted decision to cast “Dark Elegies” with many young dancers. Some of these dancers are not featured in many other ballets, thus ensuring that the current interpreters expend on this material a singular dedicatin. Of course, there is always a risk in choosing young performers for a work like this, as they might lack the necessary gravitas, and there were indeed occasional exposures of inexperience at the first showing of “Dark Elegies” last Thursday. But on the whole, the ballet was given a stirring performance.

Furthermore, the first performance cast was anchored by Julie Kent, who is one of the company’s senior ballerinas and here displayed great authority and resource. As she did last year in “Dark Elegies,” Ms. Kent exchanged her overattention to dramatic effects Tudor’s repertory with what registered as all out physical commitment, as in her searing split-second collapses into Isaac Stappas’s arms. Ms. Kent and Mr. Stappas were a handsome and eloquent couple, whose performance suggested a life together before and after the span of time encompassed by the ballet.