This "Don Quixote" needs new choreography, a better production and an acting coach, although the dancing from principals as well as corps de ballet stands up with the best we've seen this summer from the visiting Bolshoi and Mariinsky.

Some of the world's great dancers, such as Carlos Acosta and Jose Manuel Carreno, came from the company. The current principals -- including Tuesday night's Viengsay Valdes (Kitri), Yolanda Correa (Mercedes), Carlos Quenedit (Espada), and Joel Carreno (Basilio) -- display the flexible backs, insouciance of technique, accuracy of placement and big sunny smiles that characterize Cuban training.

When Acosta's father feared he was turning into a juvenile delinquent he sent him off the dirt farm to a ballet school in Havana. Instead of a life of crime he became the third name in the litany that begins "Nureyev, Baryshnikov...' Several members of this current company might be just as good.

In a country where athletic kids have a choice between football and ballet, and where ballet is thought tougher, Alicia Alonso's company is drawn from the regional schools that abound in every town and parents pray that their child will be noticed by a ballet teacher as that will guarantee a free education.

Every child tries out for ballet the way they go out for baseball in the US and every really talented child wins a place.

This is why a poor country with a population of only 11 million can field a world-class ballet company.

That's the good news. The bad news, on this "Don Quixote" showing, is that the acting is early "Sesame Street,' the sets and costumes look as if designed by a colour-blind 10-year-old, and Alonso's 1988 choreography creaks its hackneyed way into parody.

Alonso, 84, and almost blind, is still firmly in charge. She stays there by determination, political clout (she's Fidel Castro's bona fide cultural poster girl) and the help of talented acolytes. Nobody can deny her the status of Mother Teresa of the arts and the power of her achievement is undeniable.

But ballets are living, breathing, moving works of art and hers are in danger of becoming fossils. The dancers of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba are an international asset as well as a local tourist attraction and unless they are allowed to breathe fresher air in first-rate work, the best of them will inevitably follow Acosta and Carreno out of Cuba.

"Don Quixote" is at Sadler's Wells through September 8 and is followed by a mixed program on September 9 and 10.

(Ruth Leon is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)