Former Opera North boss Nicholas Payne once admitted that everyone fails with Don Giovanni. Unfortunately, Olivia Fuchs proves unable to break the company's cycle of duds.

The previous attempt, by Tim Albery, featured the cast moodily shoving leather sofas around. Fuchs's concept involves everyone scaling a grid of gantries and ladders, like a team of industrial window cleaners.

In the costume department, Fuchs and designer Niki Turner go for Spanish Civil War chic, which immediately leads to the nonsense of characters in cocktail garb drawing swords on each other. The paucity of ideas is amplified by an upstage projection screen that flashes a staggeringly inane visual commentary - a bloodied blade as the Commendatore is skewered; a detail from the Last Supper when he arrives for dinner.

Yet Fuchs's major oversight is to neglect to inject any real vitality into the Don's victims. Her reading suggests that if Don Giovanni is a cad, then his opponents are a bunch of anaemic stick-in-the-muds who had it coming.

Musically it is a different story. Richard Farnes drives the score with thrilling sensitivity to its mordant sonorities; and the vocal line up is eloquently led by Giselle Allen's plush, sumptuous Elvira and Susannah Glanville's steelier, exquisitely sculpted Donna Anna - both of whom deliver impeccably sustained performances, notwithstanding that Fuchs has both of them warm up for their showpiece arias by dragging on a cigarette.

Iain Paton makes a mellifluous Ottavio and Andrew Foster-Williams a rather sour Leporello, though Roderick Williams's Don Giovanni proves to be a slippery enigma. He possesses an elegant, seductive tone but gives no clear outward sign as to why he's supposed to be so completely irresistible. His standard-issue dinner dress is perhaps more James Bond than Don Juan, though ultimately the combination left me neither shaken nor stirred.

· Further performances tonight and January 27. Box office: 0113-222 6222. Then touring.