A Christmas Carol

This shoddy musical adaptation of Dickens’s classic is enough to make you turn a freezing shoulder on Christmas shows

Stephen and the Sexy Partridge

This amiably daft show is inspired by The Twelve Days of Christmas, with just a dash of A Christmas Carol

Detaining Justice

Indhu Rubasingham wins your goodwill early on with combative banter between illegal immigrants and a student lawyer

Petrushka

Steve Tiplady and Lyndie Wright’s bewitchingly melancholy marionette play is filled with memorable visions

Michael Flatley eat your heart out

The Brooklyn-based choreographer Mark Morris has helped create a ‘Scottish Riverdance’ at Dance Base in Edinburgh

A Christmas cracker

Pick of the week: The Nutcracker by the Scottish Ballet at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow

Carlos Acosta: a godly Apollo

Dancer Carlos Acosta is all grace, strength and joy as a deity, a faun or a worthy successor to Mikhail Baryshnikov

Three stars for Carlos Acosta at Sadler's Wells

Dancing to Debussy’s iconic score, all Acosta has to do is stretch a leg to evoke a sense of physical excitement

Handel's Messiah: ENO

Deborah Warner's effort is a turgid charity case for affluent opera goers, her basic premise is by now a well-worn cliché

The Magic Flute

The Royal College of Music haven’t exactly helped their singers by opting for Mozart in the original German

Putting the boot in

The kitsch design and past-it singers in the Royal Opera’s production of Tsarina’s Slippers just don't work

Messiah

English National Opera’s attempt to stage a masterpiece wasn’t Messiah. It wasn’t even shocking. Just embarrassingly lame

Tom Wrigglesworth’s Open Return Letter to Richard Branson

The comedian’s encounter with a jobsworth train conductor makes for a warm and witty story with a real-life happy ending

Comic performance with the write stuff

Regular live-reading show Discombobulate goes from the shambolic to the sublime at The Arches in Glasgow

The outrageous Kim Noble Must Die

The controversial comic has a created an unsettlingly personal, brillant show where suicide and stalking are fair game

The Mighty Boosh's Noel Fielding says that 'Kids are frightened of me'

Taking acid would make me normal, reckons the party boy. Helen Rumbelow finds out more