What a difference a few years make. In 2019 I reviewed composer Dani Howard’s first opera, Robin Hood, also produced by The Opera Story, and commented on the fundraising success that enabled a cast of six and an ensemble of 10.

A big welcome awaited the Alvin Ailey dancers at the Wells, on their first international tour since lockdown. The company has scheduled four different mixed bills over 10 days, each with its signature piece, Revelations, as the finale. This is a great idea as the company returned after their final bow on press night to reprise part of the piece and coax the audience onto their feet. No problem.

Matthew Bourne regularly revamps the first version of a new piece so that by the second go-round it really zings. For the return of his 2019 Romeo + Juliet, though, very little has changed, yet it feels refreshed.

When flamenco first came out of the shadows and started to fill big theatres, it was like something out of a historical pageant. The shows that played London in the early 1990s harked back to an imagined gypsy past where old men hammered rhythms on blacksmiths’ anvils and women swirled extravagant frills. The crudely amplified music lost much of its detail but audiences lapped it up anyway.

There are better musicals in town, but can you find me a more spectacular show in a more comfortable theatre? I doubt it. Not that Jonathan Church's new production at Sadler's Wells is flawless. It's a 90-year-old blockbuster so, for all its references to breadlines, insecure employment and heat-or-eat decisions, one wonders if so much effort might be better expended on something a little more recent, a little less bound by the cliches of musical theatre?

The timing was impeccable, though almost certainly accidental. As protesters lay prostrate in The Mall in a mass “die-in” on the day designated as Earth Day, and as many thousands more urged action against climate change outside the Houses of Parliament, Nederlands Dans Theater was giving its final London performance of a powerful new ballet called Figures in Extinction [1.0].

Akram Khan Company promises “a magical dance-theatre retelling of Kipling’s classic”, and that’s more or less what you get. The choreography is striking and inventive, the dancing and staging superb.

She can do anything. That’s what choreographers say about Tiler Peck, the peppy New York City Ballet principal who has launched a stream of projects above and beyond the day job. You want speed? Wham, you get it. You want complexity? She can learn a tricky phrase in seconds then reverse it and riff on it. You want nerve, verve, musicality? Those choreographers are right, this dynamo has it all.

At the arthouse end of contemporary dance no one expects a packed house, still less serial packed houses for more than a week. Yet Sadler’s Wells was fully confident when it invited the dancer-choreographer Jules Cunningham – one of its New Wave Associates – to premiere a new work on its main stage.

Matthew Bourne is not the first choreographer to tinker with the story of The Sleeping Beauty and he won't be the last, such is the lure of Tchaikovsky's score and the potency of the plot.