Can't we have him as our new Queen Mother?As for Blair's babes they

Can't we have him as our new Queen Mother?As for Blair's babes, they ought to be giving classes to the cast of The Pirates of Penzance on how to overact with style. This isn't subtle material: Miss West Coast (Miles Western) incapacitates herself with feminine hygiene products; Miss Deep South (Dale Mercer) attempts to impress the judges by belting out "The Camptown Races" with the aid of a pair of ventriloquist's dummies; Miss Industrial North East (Leon Maurice-Jones) murders the accordion on roller skates. Gurning, goggling and mugging, for sure - but precisely done by performers who are confident that their material requires and responds to such delivery, not ones who are afraid that people will get bored if they don't keep wiggling their eyebrows.'The Pirates of Penzance': Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, NW1 (020 7486 2431) to 5 Sept; 'Alice - An Adventure in Wonderland': Open Air Theatre to 26 Aug; 'Pageant': Vaudeville, WC2 (020 7836 9987) to 25 Nov. Casual observers of the London ballet scene are puzzled, and understandably so. Following the heavily publicised arrival two months ago of Russia's Kirov Ballet and Orchestra - along with its sister opera company - it now appears that the St Petersburg ballet contingent has come back for another, in some ways identical season in the very same theatre. Only this time it's a commercial venture for the impresario Victor Hochhauser.

It's in the Royal Opera House again for the simple reason that the Opera House was available and the Coliseum is not (it's closed for a makeover); and if the choice of ballets looks familiar, it's because that's what the Kirov offered and what Mr Hochhauser thought would sell And he was right. No sooner were the posters up than stickers were being plastered over them squeezing in extra dates "owing to demand". Casual observers of the London ballet scene are puzzled, and understandably so. Following the heavily publicised arrival two months ago of Russia's Kirov Ballet and Orchestra - along with its sister opera company - it now appears that the St Petersburg ballet contingent has come back for another, in some ways identical season in the very same theatre. Only this time it's a commercial venture for the impresario Victor Hochhauser. It's in the Royal Opera House again for the simple reason that the Opera House was available and the Coliseum is not (it's closed for a makeover); and if the choice of ballets looks familiar, it's because that's what the Kirov offered and what Mr Hochhauser thought would sell And he was right.

No sooner were the posters up than stickers were being plastered over them squeezing in extra dates "owing to demand". At least the season led off with something different: Leonid Lavrovsky's historic 1940 staging of Romeo and Juliet. This is the production for which Prokofiev composed his celebrated score, although in the event it was pipped at the post by a Czech production which used the same music. Acquired by the Bolshoi Ballet, the Lavrovsky version took London by storm on the Bolshoi's debut visit in 1956 and it coloured all British productions that followed, including the one we know best: Kenneth MacMillan's for the Royal Ballet.The cultural climate of 1940s Leningrad being emphatically not that of 1960s London, there is a marked contrast in feeling between the two. Lavrovsky's approach to dance drama never allows you to forget the formal framework of ballet. Even at the height of her inner turmoil, Juliet presents herself with feet in pert fifth position; mourners at the tomb arrange themselves in a perfect fan of arched backs and arms raised just so. That formality now seems stilted, a barrier to feeling rather than a conduit.There has also opened up a gulf of theatrical taste that makes us cringe from certain stylistic elements in the Lavrovsky: fathers who scowl and shake their fists at every provocation; a cartoon babushka of a Nurse with a ludicrous rolling gait; superfluous comedy from a tiresome trio of Capulet servants who get their fingers trapped in a pot.