There were apparently unanimous whoops of joy inside the Royal Ballet this morning, even as brows were wrinkling perplexedly outside, when it was announced that the likeable No 2, administrative director Kevin O’Hare, will succeed director Dame Monica Mason next year. The smiling insider is to head a team involving two of the world’s leading choreographers, Christopher Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor, which holds out the promise of a gold-plated twin-track creative approach uniting both classical and modern. With imminent budget cuts looming, this might be more of a gilt-plated reality, but still, if the personalities gel and Wheeldon and McGregor create several new works for London, the Royal Ballet will be the envy of the world.

Birmingham is the fount of beauty and magic when it comes to ballet design. Covent Garden - forget it, too much money, too little taste. What illustrates that truism is the comparison that can be made between the Royal Ballet’s cartoony Cinderella production returning to WC2 next week and the magical visual experience that is John Macfarlane’s vision for Birmingham Royal Ballet’s new Cinderella, having its London premiere at the Coliseum this week.

Family-favourite storyballets dominate Birmingham Royal Ballet's 2011-12 season, as the company looks forward to a stringent year. Beauty and Beast, Hobson's Choice and Far From the Madding Crowd, three of director David Bintley's full-lengthers, and the iconic Peter Wright Nutcracker for Christmas aim to be money-spinners for three mixed programmes, culminating in a Bintley creation next summer on an athletic theme to chime with the 2012 Olympics.

Family favourites and fewer dates on the spring split tours mark straitened circumstances for Britain's busiest touring company, Birmingham Royal Ballet, keeping a smiling, child-friendly face on. Coppelia, La Fille mal gardée and the London premiere of the new Cinderella are the mainstays of the repertoire in the season marking BRB's 20th year in Birmingham, whence the former Sadler's Wells Ballet moved in 1990.

Fairy-tale ballets are a bitch. We all grow a mental image of what is “right” when we are about five, and then woe betide anyone whose vision is different – because of course it isn’t different, it’s “wrong”. So David Bintley and his designer, John Macfarlane, are up against audiences chock-full of preconceived notions. And I’m happy to say, after BRB’s premiere of their new Christmas show last night, they passed my inner-five-year-old test with flying colours.

The designer of a fairytale ballet is far, far more important than the choreographer. It's those visions that lodge themselves in children's heads, in adults' memories, embedded with the music. And at no time more potently than Christmas when it's time for The Nutcracker and Cinderella.

“Rudolf thought, what you wanted out of life you had to get straightaway, because if you thought about it too long, you might be dead,” said the ballerina Patricia Ruanne, the first Juliet in Rudolf Nureyev’s version of Romeo and Juliet. Coming a dozen years after Kenneth MacMillan’s landmark Royal Ballet version, Nureyev’s - for London Festival Ballet - is regrettably eclipsed, for what a powerful piece of theatre it is, and this autumn the chance to see both versions side by side has underscored that even if Nureyev was not the greatest choreographer, this was a story about individuals swamped in politics - something he knew about, from experience.

Those teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet will be dying nightly on a stage near you in various guises for much of the autumn - not as Shakespeare’s play, but as ballets and operas based on it. Next week both Birmingham Royal Ballet and English National Ballet field two of the more famous versions on their autumn tours, while at the end of the month the Royal Opera stages a rare revival of Gounod’s opera.

What kind of music damages the ears? Hard rock, most people would think, as they sigh at the tinny noise pumping through their neighbour’s cheap earphones on the Piccadilly Line. Even obsessive ballet fans, the kind who spend their last pennies on a bad amphitheatre seat with atrocious sight lines at Covent Garden because Alina Cojocaru is dancing, might not imagine that for musicians sitting in the orchestra pit, the sweeping curves of The Sleeping Beauty might not be quite so romantic. It’s perhaps more obvious with Aram Khachaturian’s score to Spartacus, the ballet which includes a slave rebellion and a wild orgy. But in both ballets, the problem is the same for musicians: the music is so loud, particularly when performed in the enclosed space of the orchestra pit, that it can damage their hearing.

What kind of music damages the ears? Hard rock, most people would think, as they sigh at the tinny noise pumping through their neighbour’s cheap earphones on the Piccadilly Line. Even obsessive ballet fans, the kind who spend their last pennies on a bad amphitheatre seat with atrocious sight lines at Covent Garden because Alina Cojocaru is dancing, might not imagine that for musicians sitting in the orchestra pit, the sweeping curves of The Sleeping Beauty might not be quite so romantic. It’s perhaps more obvious with Aram Khachaturian’s score to Spartacus, the ballet which includes a slave rebellion and a wild orgy. But in both ballets, the problem is the same for musicians: the music is so loud, particularly when performed in the enclosed space of the orchestra pit, that it can damage their hearing.

It can take almost as much courage for a ballet company to look backwards as forwards, and it’s one of the quirks of Birmingham Royal Ballet that you’ll find rare heritage ballets popping up in the mix. John Cranko’s The Lady and the Fool, a Fifties period piece, nestled capriciously like a matron en décolleté in the bosom of its season-opening bill fielding the semi-skimmed abstractness of Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto and Twyla Tharp’s stunning Eighties sneaker ballet, In the Upper Room.