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Ballet companies, like individual dancers, love to demonstrate how diverse they can be. So New York City Ballet, which began its six-week spring season with eight performances of high modernism (black-and-white costuming, no scenery, most of the music by Webern, Stravinsky and Hindemith), is now giving us a tribute to Broadway, with music by Richard Rodgers, Duke Ellington and Leonard Bernstein. Nobody in New York should be seriously surprised to find such fare at the ballet -- the links between ballet and musical theater have a richer track record here than anywhere else -- but on paper it's still fun to see that City Ballet can give us a program comprising works by three artists who each have been top Broadway choreographers: George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins and Susan Stroman. The two dead choreographers profited on Thursday night from vivid performances: notably from Maria Kowroski's sensational Striptease Girl in Balanchine's ''Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,'' from the 1936 musical ''On Your Toes,'' and young Chase Finlay's touchingly ardent Tony in ''West Side Story.'' An introduction, by the conductor Faycal Karoui, part of the company's See the Music series, entertainingly brought fresh insights into Bernstein's familiar score. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three ballets choreographed to violin concertos could have been a nice idea on paper but a bad one in practice. Amazingly, however, New York City Ballet's triple violin bill on Saturday night at the David H. Koch Theater offered not just a magnificent range of 20th-century scores by Barber, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, but also a dance program that seemed perfectly composed too. First came Peter Martins's ''Barber Violin Concerto'' from 1988, set to Samuel Barber's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (Op. 14). ''Barber'' demonstrates Mr. Martins's best attributes as a choreographer: a gift for ingenious partnering; an unpredictable responsiveness to the music; a craftsmanship in moving dancers around the stage. On Saturday he was served marvelously by his performers: Sara Mearns and Charles Askegard as the classical pair; Megan Fairchild and Jared Angle as the moderns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On paper the Ballet Across America season unfolding this week at the Kennedy Center is exciting, and it causes excitement in the theater too. On three triple-bill programs nine American companies are dancing one work apiece. This, since no choreographer is represented more than once, must have taken quite some planning. Which company gets to dance a Balanchine? A Robbins, Tharp, Tudor, Wheeldon? Once those five are represented, what does that leave for the other four companies? No 19th-century choreography is included. Some troupes are dancing borrowed repertory, others works by their resident choreographers. Since no single ballet includes every company dancer, which performers are to be cast and which left in the wings? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]