Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it’s also the nuts and bolts of Broadway dance construction. What adds needless tonnage to Broadway choreographer Susan Stroman’s 2004 “Double Feature,” which was revived by New York City Ballet last week, is her attempt to fill up the very different time frames of the ballet stage. No Broadway or Hollywood producer or director would have allowed her to run at the feet as aimlessly as she does in “The Blue Necklace,” the first of the two ballets. In the slapstick “Makin’ Whoopee,” which follows the romance and sentiment of “The Blue Necklace” as star play followed tragedy at the Festival Dionysus, Ms. Stroman sticks closer to her last and proves herself an entertaining shoemaker indeed.

Both halves of “Double Feature” are intended as homages to both Broadway and silent film, and feature an entertaining gimmick: title cards projected onto a screen onstage. But the titles are not necessary, because Ms. Stroman knows how to tell a story using movement and pantomime.

In “The Blue Necklace,” Maria Kowroski is a chorus high-kicker who abandons her baby on the steps of a church, leaving cash to attract foster parentage, and a blue necklace by which her daughter can remember her. She becomes a great screen star, but is haunted by her maternal repudiation until she is eventually reunited with her now-18-year-old daughter at a party she throws in her mansion. Ms. Stroman’s quotations from ballet imagery — the morning-sickness-stricken Ms. Kowroski fumbles like Aurora pierced by the sewing needle in “The Sleeping Beauty” — are more effective than her attempts to compose extended solos and duets in the ballet lexicon. The music is a suite of Irving Berlin tunes arranged by Glen Kelly and orchestrated by Doug Besterman. They don’t really supply the rhythmic or melodic platform necessary for long sequences, but the main problem is Ms. Stroman’s banal and dilettantish use of the ballet vocabulary.

I saw the second performance of this revival run on Friday night; the cast was identical to Thursday night’s opening, and was also almost exactly the same as it had been at the 2004 premiere. Ms. Kowroski’s role does not contain any interesting movement, but the way she stands, walks, gestures, and holds herself registers as authentically benevolent and maternal, authentically gracious, authentically ritzy. Savannah Lowery made her debut as Mrs. Griffith, the wicked stepmother role originally danced by Kyra Nichols. Ms. Lowery can’t do the steps composed for the nimble and compact Ms. Nichols as well as Ms. Nichols could, but she does them well enough. Nor is Ms. Lowery a genuine harridan in the role, the way Ms. Nichols was. But, like Ms. Kowroski, she was thoroughly immersed in the kinetic profile of the part, and was ultimately persuasive.

As Ms. Kowroski’s top-hat-and-tails boyfriend, Damian Woetzel was better than he was four years ago, displaying more flamboyance, more confidence, and more nonchalance than he did originally. As Florence, the biological daughter of the wicked stepmother, Megan Fairchild is as comic-book grotesque and ungainly as she’s meant to be. But as the foundling Mabel, Ashley Bouder does not register any poignancy in this pastiche to olden-day melodrama and sentiment. Her dance attack here seemed unvarying, but these lacks are as much the fault of Ms. Stroman as they are of Ms. Bouder.

“Makin’ Whoopee” is more successful than “The Blue Necklace” because it is considerably shorter, and because Ms. Stroman studiously revives the movement flourishes of her chosen epoch but does so on thumbnail scale, without attempting to broach the foreign territory of extended balletic composition. Tom Gold is Jimmie Shannon, composite of the beleaguered but eventually triumphant underdog as embodied during the silent-screen era by Chaplin-Keaton-Lloyd-Langdon. After being rejected by his sweetheart because he can’t get out the avowal she’s waiting for, Mr. Gold must find a bride forthwith or forfeit an inheritance that will send his fortunes sky-high, and also bail out his Wall Street bucket-shop pals. Here the vignettes are short and snappy; movement is used to characterize without long-form poetic dilation. Ms. Stroman lets dance and stylized movement further the plot along, sometimes with a few doodles attached.

Mr. Gold repeats the role he created in 2004 and goes for broke to make all its motival antecedents lively, diverting, and winning. Tiler Peck, in the role first danced by Alexandra Ansanelli, makes her character less hoity-toity and closer to the balletically trained pixies who distinguished Agnes de Mille’s Broadway work of the 1940s.

After Mr. Gold’s fairy godfather, played by Arch Higgins, puts an ad in the papers soliciting potential brides for our hero, an avalanche arrives, at least one of them transvestite. Here Ms. Stroman goes to town as the self-styled brides pursue Mr. Gold across the stage and back again. Each pass across the stage en masse is individualized by running or jumping or bourréeing. It goes on too long, but not very much too long, and you appreciate Ms. Stroman’s tenacity and ingenuity in generating a real head of cumulative momentum.