Candide, The Chuck Works, Birmingham ****

Candide, for the cognoscenti, is Bernstein's masterpiece. It's easy to see why: the astonishing, Mozart-like virtuosity with which he turns out one hit after another; the sheer zest that never lets up; the unerring brilliance of his orchestration, with idea after idea generating its own fresh brand of folksy zap infused by jazz and Hispanic, Stravinsky and Copland; and its own sub-Swiftian, almost Rousseau-like tale of the boy hero, a kind of lucky chappie Peer Gynt, buffeted by thunder-bursts, shipwreck and the storms of life itself.

Who, then, to pick out from the gloriously galvanised cast of Graham Vick's astonishing Birmingham Opera Company production – meandering around another of his dotty, amenable and brilliantly employed venues, a disused car factory known as the Chuck Works? Andrew Slater's energised, ringingly-delivered ringmaster Dr Pangloss? Tenor Mark Wilde's rubbery grimaces and winsome lyricism in the tender title role? The fabulous Donna Bateman hurling forth Cunegonde's dusky arias? Or the vast team of extras?

I'd award the first Oscar to those "backstage" guys (actually very much frontstage: Vick's Birmingham productions, like Paris's Pompidou Centre, have their innards on show). Next, to designer Yannis Thavoris, for his orchestra platform liner-cum-Dutch bordello and for Cunegonde's outrageous huge pink bed, out-Russelling Ken Russell. Then to whoever designed the fabulously silent machinery – an array of chains and swings and clankless gangplanks – whose silky-smooth rolling-out and hauling-in functioning was up to Covent Garden on its present top-notch form. The chorus – swathes of them – moved silently too: they'd suddenly turn up aloft without you hearing so much as a tiptoe – and then burst into zonking good song. Stuart Stratford's orchestral team – oh, those harps and soft strings – were just fab.

Nuala Willis, as the one-buttocked old (well, middle-aged) pantomime dame who crops up with Cunegonde in a Venetian whorehouse, was everyone's Mother Goose favourite: like Frankie Howerd in drag, she is a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, a medley of all the arts: ripping forth in high mezzo, a flamencoid wonder in gusty low register, and divesting herself of cumbersome attire as gamely as Bateman's starry-nippled heroine (Robert Jones's lighting cues working still more wonders). The bit parts did well too: two judges (Fan-Chang Kong and Devon Harrison) dazzled in barber-shop close duetting; and Damian Thantrey's black-leathered baritone for Maximilian, the hapless other bloke.

A balmy fiesta, as Vick's barmy, Brummie community shows invariably are – but several notches up, for he uses his sprawling cast of extras integrally, not incidentally.