DANCE REVIEW : N.Y. City Ballet Finale at O.C. Center

George Balanchine’s “Bourree Fantasque” is a showpiece with a secret. Created in 1949 for New York City Ballet, this three-part suite to music by Chabrier is packed with technical fireworks, swirling corps maneuvers and jokes (some more deadpan than others) about French style in general, French flirtation in particular.

Both its humor and brilliance were well served by the company Sunday afternoon at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. So well, in fact, that anyone who remembered the Joffrey Ballet reconstruction of Balanchine’s more ironic “Cotillon,” (1932, music also by Chabrier) should have penetrated its secret: From its character comedy to its glamorous adagio, on through the aggressive gaiety of its finale, the later work encapsulates, brightens and expands the earlier one.

The first movement paired the sunny, leggy Wendy Whelan with a pixie cavalier: Tom Gold, ideally nimble and ardent. Their interplay maximized both the humor and technical values. In her first performance of the lead in the third movement, Katrina Killian boldly dispatched its steps without musicality or style.

The engagement’s sole “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” found the graceful, precise Kyra Nichols and the daring, assured Damian Woetzel creating a furor--especially whenever his grand-scale virtuosity came to rest in perfect terminations.

In a mostly familiar cast for “Who Cares?,” Miranda Weese attempted the “Embraceable You” duet and “My One and Only” solo for the first time, looking tiny, fleet, well coached--and nervous. Stacey Calvert persuasively danced her “Stairway to Paradise” solo and the title duet, bringing welcome sensuality to a ballet otherwise dominated by child-women on Sunday.