Dance Review by Debra Craine

Debra Craine on the final week of the Bolshoi Ballet season

London's summer ballet bonanza comes to an end this weekend as the Bolshoi and the Royal wrap up a month of performances. The Bolshoi has saved one of its best for last - Don Quixote. A new revival by the company's ballet director Alexei Fadeyechev, it offers three acts of romantic comedy emblazoned with choreographic flash and dash.

Fedeyechev's staging of Minkus's fun-filled score has its choreography firmly rooted in the traditional Petipa and Gorsky productions. There are ebullient sets by Sergei Barkhin and gorgeous costumes reconstructed from Vasily Diachkov's designs for the 1906 Moscow staging. The whispering pastels of the Dryads' tutus in Don Quixote's dream sequence are simply breathtaking.

The Bolshoi puts on a good show in Don Quixote...

The Russians take their character dancing as seriously as they do their classical dancing. Put the women into long, flounced skirts and low heels, give them a pair of castanets or a fan, and watch them go for broke, backbends so deep they graze the floor.

On Monday's opening night Nina Ananiashvili was Kitri, the romantic heroine who dupes her father into letting her marry her beloved barber Basil. She provides a splash of dancing colour, tackling the spectacular choreography with confidence and elan. Her climactic pas de deux with Andrei Uvarov's Basil brought the house down, partly because they were clearly going for a world speed record. I have never seen fouettes that fast - or indeed that precise, every one of Ananiashvili's killer turns right on the musical mark.