"Be careful what you wish for," fairy tales teach us. After I wished in December for more bite in Scottish Ballet’s saccharine Hansel and Gretel, along comes this revival of Liam Scarlett’s 2013 version of the same story for the Royal Ballet. Depicting as it does child neglect, domestic violence, paedophilia, murder, psychosis and suicide, Scarlett’s Hansel and Gretel has bite all right.

Ah, Giselle. Despite being cobbled together from a huge stack of 19th-century literary and dramatic tropes – fans of La Sylphide, Robert le Diable, Lucia di Lammermoor, Walter Scott and German Romanticism will feel right at home – and having a score from Adolphe Adam that is definitely not in the first league of ballet music, Giselle is endlessly compelling: the ballet sticks in your mind.

How silly is ballet allowed to be? It is a question that is not, well, as silly as it looks. English National Ballet’s director, Tamara Rojo, has set out her stall with a glitzy production of this 19th-century classic, her first full-length commission for her new company. What she’s selling from that stall, however, is moot.

England is the biggest and richest market for the small privately-run company Moscow City Ballet, which stands in a long history of touring companies peddling “authentically” Russian ballet to international audiences. I am forced to admire the business acumen which makes their success possible, given that English National Ballet notoriously makes heavy losses every time it ventures out of London.

When he became Artistic Director of Scottish Ballet in 2002, Ashley Page’s first creation for the company was a witty, pacy, Nutcracker, the kind of box-office friendly production all companies need to win the hearts of the public and stabilise the finances. The present bad blood between the company board and Page (whose contract was not renewed in 2012 despite a very happy and successful decade at the helm) has now led to the icing of his Nutcracker: Christmas 2014 will instead see a revival of the old 1990s Peter Darrell production.

Boing! shows that for a successful dance theatre production for children, you don't need very much. In fact, all that's required is a simple bed frame centre stage and a particularly bouncy mattress.

Travelling Light and Bristol Old Vic teamed up with children's theatre specialist Sally Cookson to create this 45-minute show, which plays out to a young audience perfectly, with just the right amount of narrative, clowning, slapstick comedy and break-dance.

The first Royal Opera House production to transfer to the West End stage, and Tony Robinson’s first theatre role in 16 years, is a dance-drama version of a children’s book about animals and features a man in a car costume being chased by comedy coppers during the interval. Dumbing down, do I hear you cry? Not a bit of it.

It has been said that Mozart, so prodigiously talented so young, seemed to be merely a vessel through which God, or the music of the spheres, or whichever higher being one chooses, channelled the sounds of heaven. So, too, sometimes, does Balanchine appear to be a vessel through which music is channelled, to take solid form in front of our eyes. And never more so when the music in question is Tchaikovsky.

In 1995 a new avian species with unfamiliar markings, the Bourne swan, drew unexpectedly large crowds to a run-down old Islington theatre. I remember it well: seats in the gods were being worn so tight then that feet attached to long legs couldn't be placed on the ground and, negotiating a tolerable view downstairs at the box office, I missed 10 minutes of the display. Since then the very masculine Cygnus bourniensis has been sighted in unlikely places all over the worldand has now returned to overwinter in a more spacious and comfortable Sadler’s Wells.

This production of Nutcracker, the 10th in English National Ballet's 60-year history, has come in for some stick in the three years since its première. Wayne Eagling, the company’s then director, produced the choreography in rather too much of a hurry, as anyone will remember who watched the third episode of Agony and Ecstasy, the BBC’s 2011 documentary about the company, in which the birth of Nutcracker was definitely filed under agony.