Crack open a ballet panto

Three cheers for Matthew Bourne, three more for his version of The Nutcracker, and three again for Sadler's Wells for reviving the box-office hit for the second year running. Bourne, best known for his all-male Swan Lake, has created a terrific Christmas show with brilliant designs, Tchaikovsky's sumptuous music, and the original's coming-of-age themes. But he's flipped the setting from a comfortable family home to a forlorn Dickensian orphanage.

The action starts on Christmas Eve with miserly orphanage director Dr Dross and his ghastly wife stealing the children's presents for their own brats - the excellent Anjali Mehra as the silkily spiteful Sugar and Neil Penlington as her fat-faced brother Fritz.

Act I starts a little slowly, with some pretty average choreography and mime. However, things soon pick up when the orphans turn on the Drosses and escape to Sweetieland via an ice-skating wonderland. This scene is great fun, with the girls in fluttering skirts and the boys as snow-going hunks. Poor dumpy Clara (Etta Murfitt) shivers in her thin frock, nowhere near as glamorous as Sugar, whose long limbs and pointy feet look fabulous in her marabou-trim skating dress. Unsurprisingly, she catches the eye of the Nutcracker (Neil Westmoreland), a square-jawed hero with whom Clara is besotted.

A consummate showman, Bourne ends Act I with our heroine down on her luck. Sugar seems to have snagged the man, and Clara fears he's gone for good. But two well-meaning cupids and some ingenious ideas propel the ballet to its happy close.

Bourne's best scenes come in Sweetieland, a Busby Berkeley fantasy of tasty treats where people can't keep their tongues off each other. Bourne hilariously remakes the original's national dances, morphing the Spaniards into a group of touchy-feely Liquorice Allsorts; and the Chinese into Marshmallow Girls, a posse of dimwitted It-chicks who bitch and fight and who can't wait to get their claws into Sugar. The Hungarian dance becomes the Gobstoppers, bovver boys with eyes and hands all over the place; and last is the sensational Knickerbocker Glory, aka the Arabian dance, a lascivious lounge-lizard who tries to seduce Clara while smoking Turkish cigarettes and probably much else besides.

Bourne has created a brilliant family show, although for all its biff-about comedy it's far more effective at bringing out the original's melancholy than many traditional productions. Tchaikovsky's music is full of romantic longing, with the Sugar Plum pas de deux a melodic reminder that disappointment is as likely as happy-ever-after.

Bourne's ballet-cum-panto reveals the music (and hence the story) as far more tender and heart-aching than the average, respectable staging. It's hard to believe now, but there was once a time when Bourne was criticised for not being a "proper" choreographer.

Until 25 January. Box office 020 7863 8000.

Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker!