Is the look to be Beckmann, Bergman or Nicky Haslam? To accompany the interviews with Nutcracker designers elsewhere, here are three very different design portfolios tackling the eternal magic of this favourite ballet with unexpected reference points. Sketches by John F Macfarlane for Birmingham Royal Ballet, Antony McDonald for Scottish Ballet and Gerald Scarfe for English National Ballet are seen with production stills alongside.

Lush, romantic storyballets are as scarce as hens' teeth these days, despite the longing of much of the ballet audience to see them. Not because they're too elementary for today's dancemakers, I'd guess, but because to make one with lively dancing characters (male, female, young, old, good, bad, rich, poor), with a flowing story, lashings of set opportunities and an atmospheric score, takes multiple theatre skills few choreographers now develop. David Bintley's Cyrano is one of these rare birds, a truly skilled family ballet with all of the above.

As a new biography of the Royal Ballet's great choreographer Sir Kenneth MacMillan by Jann Parry reveals, MacMillan's ballets are often about characters in shadowy explorations of inner states of mind. In part, his willingness to portray loneliness, sexual jealousy, greediness and violent assault in a medium usually associated with escapism and pretty fairy-tales accounts for both the attraction felt for his major ballets worldwide and also the hostility with which his efforts were greeted inside the Royal Opera House.

In the Ballets Russes centenary year it’s worth remembering that the iconic Diaghilev ballets were only the few lasting landmarks in a sea of constant novelties and shipwrecks. So if Christopher Wheeldon doesn’t take many great reviews back to the States after Morphoses’ third visit to London, he should be roundly applauded for being so generous to fellow-choreographers and mounting this enterprise in stark times that need initiative more than ever.

Britain’s favourite ballet choreographer Chris Wheeldon rode into his homeland last night, bringing with his Anglo-American company Morphoses work by himself and by Britain’s second favourite ballet choreographer Alexei Ratmansky. Two favourites should be enough to guarantee the opening programme, but there are two drawbacks: the pieces filling the middle of the programme, and the limp video in which it’s all wrapped. And the whole represents a split in taste between US and British ballet expectations from which I am beginning to fear Morphoses - that shining optimistic light of new ballet a couple of years ago - is destined forever to suffer.

Last night was Sun night at the Royal Opera House, when the opening night of the ballet season was supposedly entirely attended by winners of The Sun’s ballet-ballot.

Rubies is a ballet for a girl comfortable with her curves, who can slink her hips and tip her bottom and relish seeing the men’s eyes widen. That the said girl is a ballerina, for whom curves are usually anathema, shows the personality challenge that this snazzy, jazzy George Balanchine ballet sets to its leading lady.

Charlotte MacMillan photographed the Royal Ballet's Mayerling, with choreography by Kenneth MacMillan, music by Franz Liszt, and designs by Nicholas Georgiadis, which opens at the Royal Opera House on Wednesday. The cast is headed by Edward Watson as the death-obsessed Crown Prince Rudolf of the Hapsburg imperial dynasty and Mara Galeazzi as his partner in death, the court groupie Mary Vetsera.

Two ballets are premiered this month with big scientific subjects and new commissioned scores. Birmingham Royal Ballet's David Bintley was inspired by Einstein's principle of relativity, with a Matthew Hindson score, while Mark Baldwin at Rambert Dance Company has been excited by Darwin, with a Julian Anderson score. How does science meet dance?

Einstein+Birmingham Royal Ballet: e=mc2 by David Bintley

ISMENE BROWN: How do you think science connects with dance?

The Royal Ballet's leading ballerina Tamara Rojo was holding a large and not old but already battered diary when we met, pages and dried flowers falling out of it, along with notes and photographs. It’s barely a book, more a pile of loose papers, but it is the 10-year diary with which this extraordinary performer, still only 35, intends to see out her dancing career, and move on to her next.