Starting with its shorthand title, Peter Martins’s “Romeo + Juliet” seems most of all like a marketing gambit, designed to attract young people into the theater in order to see other young people dance onstage. The interest of authenticity — the ostensible artistic rationale for employing teenagers, or dancers just out of their teens — for the title roles is spurious. When Mr. Martins’s production, which New York City Ballet first performed last spring, was revived Saturday, Sterling Hyltin did not project youth any more vividly than Alessandra Ferri had when she danced her farewell Juliet at American Ballet Theatre last spring.

Mr. Martins’s conception makes everything in his “Romeo” as casual, contemporary, and colloquial as one could imagine. He eliminates as much expository material as possible, streamlining pantomime and filling every possible corner of the score and the stage with steps.

The cast was mostly the same as it had been on the opening night last May. As Juliet, Ms. Hyltin scampered around the role. Lightness is a cardinal virtue in ballet, but so is a definitive footprint, and that was missing this day. The short babydoll smocks she wears make her look exceedingly girlish. In supported adagios, she achieved a certain grandeur, become long rather than simply leggy.

But Ms. Hyltin has a limited comprehension of the ways her body can project emotion into the reaches of an opera house auditorium, and the role’s conception does not give her much help. In her first scene in her bedroom, there is little poignancy, whether generated by intimations of coming of age or by parental alienation. In her struggles with her parents and Paris after Romeo’s exile, as well as her anguished deliberations before and after visiting Friar Laurence, Mr. Martins keeps her caroming in a swivet that becomes increasingly less eloquent. Her disoriented ricocheting may be true to youthful confusion and emotional disarray, but it’s in the difference between such freneticism and authentic theatrical legibility that the shortfalls of the production reside.

On Saturday afternoon it was Robert Fairchild, as Romeo, who seemed more substantive; it may be that his role is better focused by Mr. Martins. Mr. Fairchild doesn’t strain beyond his means but attempts to make himself present at all times. When Romeo’s blood boils, Mr. Fairchild is convincingly savage, but largely he chooses to become a moonstruck, adoring, impressionable Romeo rather than a lusty, swaggering one. To his credit, he was able to do so without seeming puppyish — unusual in inexperienced Romeos.

For the most part, the young dancers portraying the supporting characters seem to flit in and out of visibility as far as character construction is concerned, but they all danced well. Together with mates Antonio Carmena as Benvolio and Daniel Ulbricht as Mercutio, Mr. Fairchild handled with stylish alacrity Mr. Martin’s bulked-out step content. Mr. Ulbricht’s Mercutio seems to belong more to “West Side Story,” but he danced his ballroom solo superbly. Mr. Carmena’s piazza circuit of jumps was beautiful. Amar Ramasar at times gave his Tybalt unexpected authority. Jonathan Stafford still did not seem very comfortable as Paris.

It was the strictly acting roles, many of them danced by senior NYCB performers, that registered most vividly. Nikolaj Hubbe was a glamorous Friar Laurence, while Darci Kistler and Jock Soto were dignified as Juliet’s parents. Albert Evans was more believable as the Prince of Verona than he had been at the ballet’s opening performance. Georgina Pazcoguin was extremely good as the Nurse. She gamily tossed off the pratfalls with which Mr. Martins has peppered her role, and her discovery of Juliet’s body made this one of the few episodes in the ballet that retained some of the import of the original text and story.

I found myself admiring the sets by Per Kirkeby, lighting by Mark Stanley, and costumes by Mr. Kirkeby and Kirsten Lund Nielsen more than I had at the premiere. Their subjective, iridescent palette projected strongly and wasn’t afraid to say something.