(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

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JULIE MYERSON:
It's great that a dancer like him, who is just fantastic, is doing something like this. I can see why he wanted to do this. As dance, it works. You feel at the beginning as if you are going to be in for one of those evenings in the theatre where you come out wanting it to carry on. But I wish he hadn't tried to put this story, which is fairly crude, not very well explored, and seems to hold the dancing up all the time. Nothing that he does with the drama works. At one point, a woman comes on stage and starts talking and you wonder why. There is something dated about seeing dancers, who are fantastic when they are moving, suddenly stop and do exaggerated gestures and shrugs, and the audience laugh because they feel they have to, but they are not any good at drama. Every time the story was told through dance, it was perfect.

MARK LAWSON:
Tom, it was a curious mix. We do have a woman who comes on and keeps saying, "Violence isn't the answer," and so on. It's an odd mix, is it not?

TOM PAULIN:
I agree with Julie, everything she says is true. But it was a wonderful experience, and at the end the audience, we were all on our feet clapping. They got a drum out. It was like a party. It was a spectacular experience and there was an improvised street theatre quality to the way they did things, which worked very well despite the limitations and the use of words, which I agree didn't work. But you just thought, "This is wonderful." The great socialist republic of Cuba has brought this to our shores on a hot summer's evening. It's terrific. It was great fun.

MARK LAWSON:
Tom sees it as a kind of cigar advert. Mark, it's sold as a narrative ballet. I was shocked by how banal the narrative was. Billy Elliot goes to Havana, West Side Story. Rags to riches and he gets the girl is what it amounts to.

MARK KERMODE:
I enjoyed it, the dancing was marvellous. The narrative doesn't work. The love story is all over the place. One thing that makes it worse is, in a show in which there is fantastic acoustic percussion, they do rely too heavily on synthesizers, which gives a chicken in a basket tone to it which I could have lived without. The physical comedy was marvellous and the parodies of modern dance styles were great. It is uplifting and as Tom said at the end, you do feel like doing the conga out the door at the end. But it is dramatically flawed. But I wish they hadn't used synthesizers. I would rather have a pump organ than the modern synth story.

MARK LAWSON:
I am not an expert, but I sometimes think it is ballet for people who don't like ballet, people like Matthew Bourne. But this looked pure.

JULIE MYERSON:
And sexy. The costumes were wonderful. Great clothes that looked good when they are dancing.

MARK KERMODE:
And incredibly vibrant. You feel the blood flowing.