Twelfth Night, Donmar, LondonSimply Cinderella, Curve, LeicesterAmazonia, Young Vic, LondonCinderella, Lyric Hammersmith, London

Life's a beach in Michael Grandage's staging of Twelfth Night, the latest cast-to-the-hilt classic presented under his Donmar banner in the West End. Forget the wintry title of Shakespeare's romantic comedy. Golden sunshine bathes the coastal state where Victoria Hamilton's Viola disguises herself as a manservant and then falls for her master.

This harbour town has a hint of Morocco, with Belle Epoque elements and English expats in creamy linen, brogues and Victorian bathing suits. Derek Jacobi's Malvolio, like a splendidly pompous pug dog in a starched wing collar, trots along the seafront against a panoramic blue sky. Guy Henry's lanky Andrew Aguecheek scuttles to hide from him, with Ron Cook's pint-sized, soused Sir Toby and Samantha Spiro's perky Maria – all giggling behind a stripy windbreak.

That said, it's dark and stormy at the start. A tempest is raging as Mark Bonnar's Count Orsino stumbles in like a manic insomniac, calling for more music to sate his unrequited passion for Olivia. In a billowing dressing-gown, clutching his head, he is a dangerous emotional wreck. We cut swiftly from him to Hamilton, a drenched castaway resembling a Victorian mermaid, shaking with cold and grief as she determines to dress like her twin brother, presumed drowned.

Thus Grandage finds surging desperation in poetic speeches, and Hamilton is the best Viola/Cesario I've seen. With tousled hair and a military bolero, she charmingly pinpoints the overlap between pert soldier boy and naturally assured young woman. She conveys every nuanced complexity, including shock and tender humour when she realises that Indira Varma's elegant Olivia is hitting on her.

Perhaps Varma is a little mechanical, and this production includes an obtrusive soundtrack which makes you wonder if someone's angling to make a movie. All in all, though, this ensemble must be the envy of the RSC – especially after David Tennant had to pull out of its Hamlet.

In Leicester, Simply Cinderella is the big opening production at the city's new performing arts centre, the Curve. Architect Rafael Viñoly has designed an impressive edifice. Well, it had better be, for more than £60m. Conveying accessibility, an outer shell of arching glass lets you see the curvaceous crimson heart within. And that heart neatly houses a pair of auditoriums: the main house plus a studio which can all become one space, if desired. The artistic director Paul Kerryson has clearly acquired a venue with potential. However, it wasn't such a great idea to kick off with a musical penned by a relatively unseasoned duo and staged by the star dancer turned choreographer Adam Cooper – not an experienced director.

Cooper's choreography is fine. His cast dances the jitterbug nattily. But much of Grant Olding's score is the showbiz equivalent of processed cheese, and the storyline, book and lyrics are almost surreally clumsy.

Cinderella (an affable Savannah Stevenson) toils in a modern-day shoe factory. Cycling home, she expresses a fondness for advertising hoardings, before finding a letter on the mat posted 70 years ago and having her ankles tortured by an unexplained gothic quack, brought in by her bullying stepsisters. Her bedroom poster comes alive, courtesy of digital technology (which still doesn't explain the hoardings) and the besequinned ghost of her mother – an ex-cabaret singer – clambers, none too ethereally, through the skylight. Our heroine learns the shoe factory was once a grand hotel and, time-travelling back to 1939, she gets hurriedly slushy with the ballroom band leader, the Prince of Rhythm – a peculiarly wooden chap, played by Raj Ghatak. Though ultimately bereft of her sweetheart, Cinderella slings together a pair of magic shoes and gets to run the factory.

Talk about cobbling things together. The chorus may shimmy in satin frocks, but this is a sow's ear of a production. Nice building, shame about the show.

The Young Vic has blundered too, hiring a writer-director without the skills to breathe life into its Christmas show, Amazonia. This Anglo-Brazilian collaboration offers the same ingredients that have won the venue ecstatic plaudits before: a folk tale; a band nesting beside the stage, twanging on ethnic instruments; and a set with an adventure playground feel – in this case a gigantic tree with pulleys in its branches. Alas, Paul Heritage's cast just flails woefully, lumbered with a scrappy plot and lame dialogue. Neither the impish clown Simon Trinder, playing an anxious traditional herdsman, nor the lithe, bucking village bull (actor-dancer Diogo Sales) can prevent Heritage's worthy message about saving the rainforests from being a massive bore. This culminates in the supremely dull recitation of the National Organisation of Rubber Tappers' environmental declaration of 1989. Someone should take a chainsaw to this production.

Thank heavens for Melly Still's enchantingly beautiful and also seriously bleak Cinderella, which goes back to the Brothers Grimm. The set is a silver-birch wood, with steps spiralling to a lookout where the award-winning musician Terje Isungset perches, with a thrumming Jew's harp and a megaphone made of ice, which sounds like a winter wind and wolves howling.

Be warned, this one might distress emotionally delicate infants. Still's physical theatre actors don't pussyfoot around when it comes to the gruesome heel- and toe-ectomies that Cinderella's stepsisters execute on themselves. Out comes the kitchen knife. Their eyes are gouged later. This is the King Lear of children's theatre: lots of screaming (and not just from the minors). The domestic cruelty which Elizabeth Chan's quietly sweet Cinderella endures seems painfully real. But she's a sturdy, resolute survivor, winning the love of Daniel Weyman's ardent Prince, and it makes for inspiring theatre, full of imaginative riches and creative play. Recommended.

'Twelfth Night' (0870-060 6624) to 7 Mar; 'Simply Cinderella' (0116-242 3595) to 24 Jan; 'Amazonia' (020-7922 6363) to 24 Jan; 'Cinderella' (0871-2211 722) to 3 Jan