Alexei Ratmansky has done an extraordinary job during the last three years in sorting out the cupboards of the Bolshoi's repertory. But one production that still awaits an overhaul is their current version of Petipa's exotic pantomime, La Bayadère.

Mounted by Yuri Grigorovich in 1991, this is no different from many other Soviet stagings of the classics, in the layers of 20th-century additions that frame and blur the original choreography. This Bayadère, however, is a particularly frustrating hotch-potch. On the one hand, Grigorovich imposed far too much of his own material - especially for the male dancers who pound the stage in exactly the style of stiff-legged athleticism that he coined for his own 1968 ballet Spartacus. (Roman legions, Indian warriors - interchangeable steps). On the other hand, Grigorovich made no use of his editorial freedom to excise the most embarrassingly obsolete material he inherited - the grimly capering "picaninny" dancers that haunt acts one and two. There has been a toning-down of black face paint, but still these are an urgent candidate for a rethink.

Yet, despite the period nonsense, the Bolshoi's opening cast ensure that this Bayadère is a riot. Svetlana Zakharova occasionally reverts to some former bad habits, slamming her arabesques into place and clipping her phrasing, but much of the time she is a liquid, fascinating Nikiya, her eerily musical arms casting a veil of mystery over her character. Maria Alexandrova as her royal rival Gamzatti is an even more expressive dance-actor; the greedy smile with which she boasts ownership of her fiance Solor is both chilling in its sense of entitlement and poignant in its emotional ignorance. As for Nikolai Tsiskaridze, whirling and simpering as Solor, never has the ballet's hero looked so irresistibly shallow.

· Ends tonight. Box office: 0870 145 0200