Frederick Ashton’s “The Dream,” may be based on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” but it could be subtitled “As You Like It.” First performed by American Ballet Theatre in 2002, and revived by ABT Friday night, the ballet was created by Ashton in 1964 for London’s Royal Ballet, which was not impervious to the Swinging ’60s culture swirling around its doors. The then 60-year-old choreographer reveled in the opportunity to make his ballet as overarchingly erotic as possible. The Oberon-Puck relationship is at times is homoerotically patterned on Jupiter and Ganymede. Fairy queen Titania suggests a tail-switching milkmaid who prefers to conduct as much business her bower secluded away at the back of the stage.

Choreographed to the famous Mendelssohn music, “The Dream” references the entire tradition of British Arcadian romance, as well as the styles, timing, and archetypes derived from popular British entertainment. Ashton also successfully constructed for Oberon’s and Titania’s solos and duet a singular movement language suitable to fantastic woodland creatures.

As Oberon at Friday night’s opening, Ethan Stiefel again demonstrated his creative daring, posing, and glamorous declaiming, as if he had studied a miraculously-preserved videotape of Laurence Olivier playing Oedipus Rex. His glowering and raging were marvelously strange. In the Scherzo, he emphasized the axes-shifting character of his furious spins, not always turning with complete aplomb while providing a compensatory storm front of cyclonic force.

Xiomara Reyes’s height works against her ability to manifest Titania’s queenly dominance, but it also enables her to suggest the chimerical dimension of mythological fairies, often imagined as minutely elusive to the mortal eye. Ms. Reyes summoned every inch of artistry at her disposal and gave a convincing impersonation.

In place of Mr. Stiefel, resurgent after injuries, we had at the Saturday matinee the ascendant David Hallberg making his debut in the role. Here, again, we saw the way outlandish disguises increase Mr. Hallberg’s acting confidence, as was apparent with his Death in “The Green Table” in 2005. But he’s also gained inherently in the presence and repose needed for the lordly Oberon. Mr. Hallberg danced well without taking the same risks as Mr. Stiefel.

In her debut as Titania, Gillian Murphy assumed her role with complete assurance. She was relaxed in all the acting situations, neither reticent nor overemphatic, and she accomplished with complete naturalness some passages of classical mime included in the role.

Herman Cornejo and Carlos Lopez were notable Pucks at Friday’s and Saturday’s performances. Mr. Cornejo was a shade more brilliant in movement, Mr. Lopez a shade more inventive in his approach to the character. The supporting roles were danced with knockabout vigor, and were amusingly brought to life.

“The Dream” was preceded by Balanchine’s “Symphonie Concertante,” performed Friday night by Julie Kent and Paloma Herrera and Saturday afternoon by Michele Wiles and Veronika Part. The two ballerinas in the piece represent the music’s solo violin and viola parts. At these opening performances, unfortunately, none of the four ballerinas was able to live up to the dauntingly high standard they achieved last fall during ABT’s City Center season. Ms. Kent and Ms. Herrera’s first performance there had a unique drive, tautness, as well as lyrical amplitude. Friday night they acquitted themselves more than respectably, but still gave only an outline of what they had done last season. In the opening Allegro, maestoso movement, Ms. Kent’s pirouettes gave her trouble. She rallied in the final measures of the third movement Presto, however, performing the way one would have liked to see her do throughout the ballet.

Likewise at the Saturday matinee, neither Veronika Part’s pirouettes nor her balance were doing her bidding in the first movement. Her attack was sluggish — something different from the softer cushion she imparted to the allegro last fall — which lent a welcome luxury to her performance. On Saturday, Ms. Part was, however, glorious in the second movement Andante. In the final Presto, she extended the same arabesque she had in the Andante, but here, dictated by the tempo, accomplished it in half the time. Circuiting the stage, however, her jumps hardly left the ground at all. Ms. Wiles had a few moments of strain, but gave a more even performance, and her stamina didn’t flag in this workout of a ballet that calls upon every imaginable element of ballerina technique. Ms. Wiles is inherently an allegro dancer, but on Saturday afternoon, she was able to cover all bases.

Gennadi Saveliev on Friday night and Maxim Beloserkovsky on Saturday afternoon supported these ballerinas handsomely. The ballet’s ensemble of women — six demisoloists and 16 corps — fanned out across the vast Met stage with so much confidence that watching the ballet here one almost wondered how it had ever been contained on the City Center’s stage last fall.

Finally, ABT wrapped up its performances of Lar Lubovitch’s “Othello” last week with Alessandra Ferri as Desdemona, marking one of her final appearances with the company, from which she retires this season. When Ms. Ferri joined ABT in 1985, she was already precociously renowned in London for her performances in Kenneth MacMillan’s dance dramas. She remains above all a neoclassical and dramatic ballerina, but her experience with the classic and romantic repertory into which she was initiated at ABT has made her both a more suave and more restrained dance actress. She connected with the whirling, ravening MacMillanlike elements in her duets with Marcelo Gomes’s Othello but didn’t hyperventilate in them. Ms. Ferri’s famously curved feet and yielding back added to the mobile quality of Mr. Lubovitch’s second act. Now in her early 40s, Ms. Ferri was a believably girlish Desdemona, but gave a little more worldly suggestion to the character that contrasted with the innocence Ms. Kent had emphasized in her portrayal two nights earlier.