Lowry, Salford
It takes courage to bow out at the peak of one's career. It takes a strange kind of foolhardiness to step straight back in again as a rank beginner in a range of unfamiliar genres. But such is Darcey Bussell's addiction for the stage that barely six months after taking her final leave of the Covent Garden stage she's on a month-long tour; hoofing, strutting and, wait for it - singing.
And if that were not strange enough, Bussell has teamed up with Katherine Jenkins - the world's biggest selling mezzo soprano and official Welsh rugby team cheerleader, who has spent the past few months learning to tap dance.
During one of a number of rather stilted on-stage chats, Bussell produces a top hat which her father bought on the Portobello Road and reminisces about "the fab Hollywood routines I used to do in my bedroom"; yet while most girls manage to leave them there, she and Jenkins have opted to re-enact their fantasies in the nation's arenas.
Directed and choreographed by Kim Gavin, whose credits include producing Take That's reunion extravaganzas, the show begins with the girls bursting out of a giant television set and develops into a camp tribute to anyone who ever wore more diamonds and fur than strictly necessary, alighting in no particular order on the careers of Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn, Cyd Charisse and Madonna.
As grand theatrical charades go, it's hardly on a par with Rufus Wainwright's even more preposterous wish-fulfilment exercise, in which he booked out the London Palladium for a note-for-note reconstruction of Judy Garland's legendary Carnegie Hall programme. Yet Bussell always seems to have understood it to be part of her job description as Britain's most popular ballerina never to take herself too seriously.
Yet it's this same approachability which seems to preclude her entering the mindset of the Hollywood monsters she admires. It's the absolute lack of diva-ish attributes which makes her seem benign to the point of blandness. And though her every gesture is pure poetry, slinkiness is the one quality which evades her.
Yet she portrays Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes with infinitely more conviction than Jenkins does Maria Callas in the Barber of Seville. It has to be said that hers is a voice better suited to belting out Land of My Fathers at the Millennium Stadium than skipping through the perilous coloratura of Rosina's skittish cavatina.
· Until Sat and then touring. Ticket hotline: 0871 2200 260
· This article was amended on Monday December 3 2007. Moira Shearer appeared in The Red Shoes, rather than Chicago, where an editing slip placed her. This has been corrected.