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The French choreographer Jérôme Bel is one of the dance world's quirkier talents, and even he admits that dance itself is not his driving inspiration. A conceptual artist - yes, dance has them too - he uses movement when it suits and eschews it when it doesn't. He's also something of a provocateur - on-stage nudity, urination, that kind of thing - and he's been a darling on the festival circuit for years. Now Sadler's Wells is honouring Bel with a two-week retrospective, the centrepiece of which was a one-off performance of his 2001 production, The Show Must Go On.

It's a beguiling mind game that casts Johannes Sundrup as disc jockey and 18 performers as his pawns in what is basically a droll dance through Bel's record collection. What saves it from banality is Bel's cerebral sense of humour, born of the literalness with which the staging relates to the music. The pretentious programme note is off-putting, but this show is anything but pretentious. Bel may be making points about the relationship between stage and spectator, as well as taking pot shots at accepted theatrical conventions, but his touch is so delightfully light that it's hard not to play along.

The music for this postmodern party is a collection of popular songs, from Broadway musicals (Hair, West Side Story) to the Beatles, David Bowie and Queen. The humour is so deadpan and silly that you have to laugh. For Let the Sunshine In, the stage lights up. When the Police sing Every Breath You Take, everyone on stage turns to face the audience and just stands there watching us. For John Lennon's Imagine the stage is dark - get it? - and while Celine Dion belts out My Heart Will Go On the dancers sink below the stage on a moving platform, in a mock Titanic moment. It's so much funnier than it sounds.

Sundrup has a brief solo in the spotlight, to Tina Turner's Private Dancer; then, as if discovered doing something naughty, he retreats to his mixing desk, where he's more comfortable orchestrating others. The movement (it hardly qualifies as choreography) can be manic, rude and exhausting, or as quiet as a whisper. At 90 minutes, though, the show is too long. Do we really need to hear every song in its entirety, especially when the point has been made in the first 30 seconds? Still, the plucky performers - a wayward bunch if ever I saw one - take us through even the boring bits with such wry amusement that it's hard to complain.

Debra Craine 12.02.2008