Tidings of great joy: a Christmas miracle in Leeds! A modern composer has produced a new opera that is funny, poignant, tuneful, spectacular – and, best of all, stunningly conceived for all the family. To find an opera house full of eight-year-olds, held spellbound throughout a show lasting nearly three hours, is rare enough. To find that discerning adults – and yes, even grizzled old critics – are also grinning from ear to ear at the final curtain is pretty well unprecedented.

This must be Jonathan Dove’s finest hour. The Hackney-based composer has produced some entertaining community and youth-orientated shows over the past couple of decades. But with the help of a delightfully droll libretto from his long-time collaborator, Alasdair Middleton, he has turned Carlo Collodi’s classic fairytale into a surreal wonderland of music-theatre that leaves an indelible impression.

The orchestration alone is masterly: a quick-change succession of ear-tickling timbres and catchy rhythms. They perfectly evoke the gaudy kaleidoscope of misadventures and dodgy characters that assail the aspiring boy-puppet as he gradually learns, mostly the hard way, what it is to be a proper human being.

It’s true that Dove’s music contains plenty of echoes. Sondheim, Britten, Bernstein, American minimalism, and (in its sinuous Lydian-mode melodies) even Vaughan Williams come to mind. But whatever its influences, the score is a magically crafted vehicle for a pacy story.

And on stage Dove and Middleton create a fabulous array of characters. There’s Pinocchio himself (the superb Victoria Simmonds, gamely strapping on tomboy knees and surely the longest nose ever seen in lyric theatre) and his long-suffering dad and creator (Jonathan Summers), reunited with his offspring in the belly of a giant fish. There’s the chirruping Cricket (Rebecca Bottone, pinging out some stratospheric top Fs while hovering halfway up a wall) and a wonderfully sleazy Cat and villainous Fox (Mark Wilde and James Laing). There’s the imposing Graeme Broadbent playing a succession of sinister men-in-uniform, and Allan Clayton, short-trousered and stroppy as the schoolboy turned into an ass for his laziness. And of course there’s the Blue Fairy (Mary Plazas, in luscious voice), who manages to pluck Pinocchio from the jaws of disaster time after time, though she sometimes leaves it perilously late.

Martin Duncan stages this glorious rollercoaster of a tale – much darker and stranger than the sanitised Disney film – like a high-class panto: lavish and exuberant. The high wooden walls of Francis O’Connor’s ingenious sets swivel from carpenter’s hut to spooky wood, and from mountainous sea to claustrophobic jail. Characters pop out of holes and zoom down from the flies. There are cartwheeling dancers, roly-poly policemen and a 12ft-tall Big Fisherman who looks like a troll fed on steroids.

The show is a true ensemble effort. And with David Parry keeping the music whizzing along in the pit, the chorus and orchestra of Opera North respond vibrantly to its demands. Beg, borrow, steal or preferably buy a ticket.

Further shows in Leeds until January 26, then touring. Box office: 0844 8482720

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