When future historians write the story of 21st-century film, Mike Figgis will play a founding father-like role. Figgis's Timecode (2000) was one of the world's first and most ambitious digital films. I still remember the excitement the day I saw it, the unified screen before me shattering into shards of narrative. This was the first film to sing in four simultaneously cast parts in the manner of a Bach fugue. Notwithstanding its many faults, it felt like the silver screen's Ring cycle.

Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia comes gift-wrapped in its own candy-striped box – packaging that sets the tone for the brittle, sugary entertainment within. Trading satire for slapstick, politics for aesthetics, and subversion for celebration, the production is generous in laughs but lingers scarcely longer in the mind than on the lips. With previous alumni including Mark Elder, Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez, there are some long shadows looming over the show’s hot-pink horizon, adding a not unwelcome sense of edginess to this latest revival – an edginess entirely absent from the production itself.

“If you’re not careful, the opening act could become a costume parade: there are the townspeople, the children, the guards, the factory women – up to 350 people on stage in 20 minutes, before Carmen even enters, singing a catchy jingle from a recent TV advert.” So wrote director Daniel Kramer in last week’s Guardian. This may fill Carmen fans with nervous apprehension, but none should be felt, as this production is one of the most visually spectacular and exciting things I’ve seen.

Fairy tales are fear tales really, the sweetening (and sharpening) of every child’s worst nightmares, emotions long buried in adulthood but very easily tapped back into with good theatre productions. The Witch in Hansel and Gretel should be the queen of the team of the ogres who lurk in forests or homes waiting to kill children, along with lieutenants the Wolf in Red Riding Hood, Snow White’s wicked stepmother and Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty.

In the Sun King's domain, dazzling noon succcumbed to a monstrous snowstorm at twilight. Within the chandeliered splendour of his successor Louis XV's Opéra Royal, a similar drama was about to be enacted: heroic Bellerophon, caught in time-honoured operatic fashion in a struggle between two love rivals, would have to face the chimera on the road to glory. Since this was the by-and-large cosy Lully rather than radical Rameau, I wasn't expecting to feel any pity and terror. Yet pity and sympathy there certainly were thanks to Lully's finest inventions in the hands of Christophe Rousset's Les Talens Lyriques and a superlative Belgian chamber choir.

In the Sun King's domain, dazzling noon succcumbed to a monstrous snowstorm at twilight. Within the chandeliered splendour of his successor Louis XV's Opéra Royal, a similar drama was about to be enacted: heroic Bellerophon, caught in time-honoured operatic fashion in a struggle between two love rivals, would have to face the chimera on the road to glory. Since this was the by-and-large cosy Lully rather than radical Rameau, I wasn't expecting to feel any pity and terror. Yet pity and sympathy there certainly were thanks to Lully's finest inventions in the hands of Christophe Rousset's Les Talens Lyriques and a superlative Belgian chamber choir.

Events surrounding the birth of the unrepentantly "un-American" Marc Blitzstein's early (1936-7) shot at socially aware music-theatre prove much more interesting than the show itself. Heck, I got more out of reading the programme than I did sitting through the whole darned thing. Let's face it, Blitzstein's mostly foursquare marriage of words and music sucks. Not that the dynamic Mehmet Ergen's latest Arcola team didn't give it their best shot.

A problem child in any number of ways, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail doesn’t always get the professional attention it deserves, certainly not from London companies. The opera’s last outing at the Royal Opera House dates back almost a decade, and you’d have to look even further back to find it in English National Opera’s performing catalogue. If a director manages to get past the knotty Orientalist issues of staging then there are those of the dialogue, not to mention two of Mozart’s most taxing vocal roles in Belmonte and Konstanze. All of which places the focus firmly onto semi-staged performances such as last night’s superb effort by Bernard Labadie and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.