When dealing with the big beasts of the classical repertoire, the Royal Ballet has a history of both playing it straight and playing it very, very well. Peter Wright’s venerable production of The Nutcracker is a case in point: although sticking close to the original scenario and choreography, Wright (along with designer Julia Trevelyan Oman) created in 1986 a show that feels ever-fresh in 2013.

“Comedy in ballet can be notoriously difficult to get right.” So warns the programme note for The Taming of the Shrew, choreographer John Cranko’s 1969 adaptation of Shakespeare, with which Stuttgart Ballet chose to end their run at Sadler’s Wells this week. The note of caution is well sounded in this context; while it is possible for the ballet to be both funny and affecting, the balance is extremely hard to strike, and yesterday's performance at Sadler's Wells was teetering dangerously on the edge of farce.

Stuttgart Ballet, one of Europe's most highly respected companies, is clearly determined to show London its best sides – all of them. Thirteen pieces in one performance is less a mixed bill than a tasting menu, and one that aims to impress: this smorgasbord of pieces were all choreographed for the company, and more than half have not been performed in the UK before.

This triple bill is of works commissioned for the Royal Ballet: Kenneth MacMillan’s The Rite of Spring was first performed in 1962, Wayne McGregor’s Chroma had its debut in 2006 while this is the world premiere of David Dawson’s first ballet for Covent Garden, The Human Seasons.

Can tango ever really be interesting as a pure dance stage show? After all, like most forms of social dance, its truest incarnation is in the fleeting and contingent encounters of the dance hall, the public ball, the open-to-all-comers late night bar. Making tango slick, polished, professional and repeatable enough to put behind a proscenium has all too often made it clichéd and even boring, predictably marketed through the putative sex appeal of tight dresses, twining ankles, and “Latin passion”.

The first time you see a Shechter piece, you feel it, literally as well as figuratively: percussive is a mild word for his forceful choreography, the stamping, churning, yearning of his sweeping shapes and rhythms. Percussive is the music, too (Shechter played drums in a rock band), which he co-writes, and it is played at volumes that make it vibrate through the theatre.

Most children's theatre productions are usually either heavily branded (think Peppa Pig's roadshow) or - particularly with dance - saccharine to the point of patronising (think My First Cinderella). It is refreshing then, to see a kid's company that brings contemporary dance in its most organic form, to children. And reassuring to see that they can totally handle it.

After a busy year, moving their headquarters from Chiswick to new premises on the South Bank, Rambert dance company have managed to keep momentum working with stalwarts such as Ashley Page and Mark Baldwin as well as branching out with exciting new choreography by Barak Marshall.

It’s been a good year for the colourful side of classical ballet in England. Anyone who thought the 19th-century greats were all about swans, sylphs and wilis, ghostly in clouds of white tulle, will have reconsidered after seeing two productions of La Bayadère (idols in India) and two of Don Quixote (castanets in Castile), both of which are not so much spectral as full spectrum.

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Sometimes, of course, it’s even better to be both. And Birmingham Royal Ballet, in their all-too-brief London season, have been both lucky and good. Lucky, because they have Peter Wright’s little jewel of a production to dance; and good because, well, they’re good in it.