BOURNE to be wild, Matthew Bourne was the choreographer behind the all-male Swan Lake, as seen in the finale to Billy Elliot.

Like Leeds company Northern Ballet Theatre, he explores the field of dance theatre, and having first staged his vision of Nutcracker! with Opera North a decade ago, he returns to Leeds with his New Adventures to present his sugar-dusted re-vision.

The exclamation mark is apt because Nutcracker! is as effervescent, insubstantial and Pop Art-colourful as candyfloss, and camper than Frankie Howerd.

Bourne has kept Tchaikovsky's leaping music but shaken up the story, setting it in Dr Dross's grey orphanage, from where young Clara (Etta Murfitt) escapes in her dream to the Frozen Lake (cue stylised ice skating in dry ice) and onwards to the pink palace of Sweetieland.

The orphanage sequence is too long, too repetitive - a fault throughout - until Alan Vincent's Nutcracker brings magic to this grey world with his wobbly-legged doll dancing as trees and ice crack open the orphanage walls. You wish the dancing would have the same impact, but it is radical only in ignoring the classical merits of point work, and only Arthur Pita's Knickerbocker Glory pastiche of a Terry-Thomas bounder outshines his costume in the fantasy fashion show of Sweetieland.

This spice box of pink fluffy Marshmallow girls and Latino Liquorice Allsorts becomes Liquorice One Sort as the choreography turns monochrome and monotonous. The ending is rushed too. Style but not enough content.

Updated: 12:09 Thursday, April 24, 2003