English National Ballet, Royal Albert Hall, London

Forget the poster campaign showing a fresh-from-the-shower squad of male dancers swaddled in national flags. That was just a bid to bring in the soccer widows. The focus of English National Ballet's current arena extravaganza isn't boys at all. It's those 60 girl swans.

Of course, the Busby Berkeley effect was the selling point of Derek Deane's Swan Lake when it showed first time round five summers ago. All those white tutus. All those conveyer-belt rows of meringues tessellating into diamonds, whorls and wedges. But ENB has staged other arena ballets since then, learnt confidence in commanding an audience through 360 degrees, even changed its director. And technically – in terms of perfectly angled heads and arms and feet – this revival is streets ahead of its 1997 showing. The magic-mushroom visual buzz of the white acts is intense.

Yet practical and dramatic problems remain unsolved. Despite the democratic benefits of an arena (where in theory every seat gives an equally good view), one misses a lot of crucial business in this production. The mime that signals the Queen's wish that Siegfried find a bride, and his moody reluctance to comply, is blocked to half the house by Siegfried's back. Nor did I ever learn why Odile was trapped in a swan's form by day, or of the deal that would set her free. This might not bother regular ballet-goers, but it will befog first-timers – the very audience this show has in its sights.

Getting a clear view of the steps is no problem: Deane's choreography repeats its motifs north, south, east and west – sometimes with such dizzying insistence that the opening night Odile, Kirov ballerina Svetlana Zakharova, was counting so hard she forgot to act. Some sequences blossom in the remodelling. The cygnets' dance, with its sprightly nods and hops, is twice the fun in double vision. And Siegfried's Act One Adagio is elegantly extended to lap the arena twice.

On Wednesday, the Bolshoi's Sergei Filin (aptly named, since he was replacing an injured Igor Zelensky), found a rare few moments of rapt lyricism in its fondue balances and pensive jumps. But there is an aching hole in the middle of this Swan Lake, a hole as deep as the Albert Hall is high and wide. It lacks emotional tension. And no wonder, when its protagonists have to semaphor their desire across such a distance, and poor Odette has to take no fewer than 18 paces from the perimeter of the stage in echoing silence before she can start her solo number. Yet the bigger the talent, the more gruesomely fascinating it is to see artists surmounting these obstacles to their expressive goals. It's a cruel sport, really it is.

Dramatic tension features rather more often in Rome & Jewels, the Philadelphia hip-hop Romeo and Juliet currently threatening to inflict structural damage on the stage of the Peacock Theatre. Rennie Harris's gangland take on the story is more about modern American sub-culture than 16th-century Verona, and his bold decision to cut out both the poison plot and the physical person of Juliet (Jewels) keeps the focus firmly on the mad, the bad and the macho with darkly thrilling effect.

Harris colour-codes the plot to make it easier to follow. The "Monster Qs" (Montagues) are hip-hoppers in black; the "Caps" are breakdancers in red. Roughly speaking, hip-hoppers stomp upright with bouncy backflips thrown in. B-boys spend most of their time casually spinning on their heads – or a single hand or elbow, or even the curve of a spine. Although the distinctions seem to blur occasionally, by the end of this show you feel like an expert.

Yet unlike most street dance shows that have gone before, Rome & Jewels resists being simply a showcase for eye-popping gymnastics – you have to wait almost to the end for that. Its great achievement is the way it shows 400-year-old feelings coursing through the veins of today's sidewalk renegades, and gives them voice as well as physical expression.

Once Rome (the remarkable Rodney Mason) has set out his bleak, feral territory, the greeting "Whassup homey?" leads so easily into "Two households, both alike in dignity" that you scarcely notice the join.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk

'Swan Lake': Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (020 7589 8212), to Sat; 'Rome & Jewels': Peacock Theatre, London EC1 (020 7863 8222), to Sat