As a rule, the gala audience wants flash, expects flash, and is disconcerted if it doesn’t get flash. For the most part, American Ballet Theatre catered to its audience at its opening night gala at the Metropolitan Opera House on Monday night. But not with Antony Tudor’s “Judgment of Paris,” which aroused laughter, but received tepid applause, despite the fact that the three clip-joint beldames were performed by three noted ABT veterans: Bonnie Mathis, Kathleen Moore, and Martine van Hamel. Their intended quarry was impersonated by none other than ABT’s artistic director Kevin McKenzie, and the desiccated waiter by ABT’s associate artistic director, Victor Barbee. Although the original creators of “Judgment” were young, it’s often cast with performers closer in age to the three superannuated entertainers on view, thus adding a voyeuristic element to the audience response. Ms. van Hamel and Ms. Mathis are in their early 60s, and Ms. Moore is pushing 50. Nevertheless, on Monday night, the state of all three women’s gams — you can’t call them legs in a setting as louche as Tudor’s — made it clear that 60 is the new 40, and 50 is just getting going. Their toned bodies existed alongside uncompromising stage behavior. Ms. Moore had a more tomboyish quality than the other two, but all three women portrayed tough and played-out specters from society’s underbelly. Mr. McKenzie was raffishly high-hat, and Mr. Barbee as sleazy as required.

The program opened with excerpts from Ronald Hynd’s “The Merry Widow,” with Paloma Herrera venturing gamely into the difficult coordination of a belle-of-the-ball character/classical mishmash variation. One of the last things that ABT needs to cultivate right now is more short male whippersnappers, but Joseph Phillips showed himself eminently worthy of catapulting into this slot in some Ruritanian-style carousing.

Then came David Hallberg as the wizard Rothbart, mesmerizing the prospective brides in Mr. McKenzie’s “Swan Lake” ballroom; this seemed more like an excuse to get Mr. Hallberg onstage than something really gala-worthy. After that was “Splendid Isolation III,” a duet by Jessica Lang, danced by the husband-and-wife team of Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky, who seemed to have wandered into different closets. Ms. Dvorovenko wore a stage-engulfing evening gown designed by Elena Commendador, while Mr. Beloserkovsky was clad only in briefs as he took refuge under her skirts or piloted her so that she and her skirt flared into galleon sails. Finally, she ditched her billowing folds and stepped out with him in just a maillot. Emotionally, this piece did not entirely compute, but it gave the audience some spectacular visuals.

The grand pas de deux from “Don Quixote” is a gala cliché that was rescued from such by Gillian Murphy and Ethan Stiefel, who danced it minus the individual variations. Ms. Murphy was ebullient and inoffensively technical. Mr. Stiefel is either better than ever or less than stellar at this stage of his career. His high points are so interesting that they render irrelevant the occasional laboriousness. I haven’t seen these two dance together in several years, and they seemed now more like a real partnership and less like an established star shepherding a younger one.

The first half of the evening’s entertainment closed with Diana Vishneva’s “Dying Swan.” Ms. Vishneva has continued to evolve her interpretation since we saw it at the Kirov’s City Center season last month. But I still find it oddly put together. She begins grandly and beautifully, but as her swan song progresses, her bird’s struggle against death seems needlessly self-flagellatory.

After “Judgment,” there was the Act 2 pas de deux from “Giselle,” danced by Nina Ananiashvili and Angel Corella, resuming their partnership of last season. Ms. Ananiashvili seemed to be ready to fly out of Mr. Corella’s arms. She put her all into her final leap offstage, and it had a haunted urgency.

There were two snippets from “Le Corsaire.” Herman Cornejo danced a variation of the pirate hero Conrad. The gala climate seemed to encourage him to toss off things with more physical charge than physical precision, but in swashbuckling “Le Corsaire,” this doesn’t matter as much as it would elsewhere. Dancing the famous Act 2 pas de deux were Xiomara Reyes and Jose Manuel Carreno. There was some technical unraveling in Ms. Reyes’s performance, but there wasn’t anything really wrong with the way she danced — it’s just that this is a grand ballerina role, which is not Ms. Reyes’s natural habitat. Mr. Carreno packed a good deal of his old wallop.

In the final encounter of John Cranko’s “Onegin,” Marcelo Gomes, cosmetically grayed hair notwithstanding, was not really the reformed reprobate, although at times he nearly drowned in the duet’s hyperventilated emotionalism. Julie Kent seemed at moments not to have grown past the Tatiana of the poem or ballet’s first stages. At other moments, she was admirably passionate without hysteria.

The gala closed with a preview of Harold Lander’s “Etudes,” which the company revives in full next month. Included were some of the most difficult sections, and leads Michele Wiles, Sascha Radetsky, and Mr. Corella, as well as the men’s ensemble, found themselves running very fast just to stay in place. The women’s ensemble was better.