While the ballet has undergone countless reinterpretations since Marius Petipa premiered it in 1869, it never seems to shed its fiery fan-waving and slapstick antics, for better or worse. Here, as ever, there’s much preening and flaunting and pratfalling to the beat of clip-clopping castanets. In goofy panto fashion, the show plays fast and loose with its side character casting, happily slapping a beard and fat suit on Olivia Chang-Clarke to play Sancho Panza and squeezing Tom Hazelby into Amour’s metallic miniskirt. There’s more than a touch of drag to Don Quixote and Gamache’s costuming (Jonathan Payn and August Generalli, respectively)—think powdered cheeks, curlicue moustaches and poodle wigs—and neither dances so much as blunders his way across the parade of escapades.

I want to root for these theatrics, and there are plenty of times when they spark a genuine laugh— witness Generalli sliding belly-first into the wings—but the folly works best in contrast to sparkling classical virtuosity; when the technique slips, as it periodically does here, so does the goodwill. Messy moments mainly come from dancers moving simultaneously but not quite in sync, prompting a missed catch here and lagging allegro there. I spotted at least one out-and-out fall and a pointe shoe escaping a foot (both styled out admirably, to be fair). Across the corps, some fans are wielded deftly, others like an awkward appendage. The company’s enthusiasm’s not in question; I just left with the feeling that it could all stand to be sharper, zestier, crisper.