First the good news. Opera North's new production of Manon Lescaut is Richard Farnes's first as the company's music director, and it is a thoroughly auspicious beginning. He has total control of all that happens in the pit - the Opera North orchestra plays superbly for him - and every detail of Puccini's lustrous score is at his fingertips, with each throb and flicker of its dramatic pulse vividly conveyed. If other elements in the production are less than convincing, at least the quality of Farnes's contribution is never in doubt.

Certainly, some of the singing makes good use of the secure orchestral foundation he provides, notably Brian Bannatyne Scott's all-too-plausible Geronte and Christopher Purves's weak-willed Lescaut. The two central roles are often vocally striking, too: the beefy, Italianate sound of Hugh Smith's Des Grieux is set against the edgier (and, in the lower register, uncomfortably thin) tone of Natalia Dercho's Manon, and they combine powerfully. But neither of the singers is remotely convincing visually. Smith lacks youthful vitality, and Dercho's Manon is short on charm, making her character even more unsympathetic than usual.

But then, not much is convincing about Daniel Slater's staging. Robert Innes Hopkins' designs relocate the story to France immediately after the liberation in 1945. That is fine as far as it goes, but the protagonists have also been made into characters in a movie directed by the usually peripheral Edmondo (Gordon Wilson). The trappings of a 1940s film set - lights, camera, clapperboard - dominate the first act, but are subsequently more or less discarded until the end of the final scene, when the lovers die in the desert (a railway track in this version), only to get up and walk off the set as the "director" reappears with his clipboard.

It is contrived and baffling, and adds absolutely nothing to any understanding of the story. The Lulu-style film sequence projected during the orchestral intermezzo before the third act, showing Manon having her head shaved in prison and being branded with a swastika (presumably because she is thought to be a Nazi collaborator), adds yet another gloss, and seems to hint at another production altogether. It's just a mess, really - though the glorious music survives.

· In rep until November 5. Box office: 0113-222 6222. Then touring.