Dividing the dance critics….

While the naysayers variously call it “jaw-dropping folly” that “makes you cringe” (Frater) and refer to the choreography as “strictly cliché” (Brown), the yay-sayers reply with Crain labelling it “a sleek and hugely enjoyable production”, while Mackrell says, “Perhaps it doesn’t matter that the format of the show is a disconcerting hotchpotch given that some of these star turns are so blindingly good.”

I went last night, keen not to miss Barbara Cook giving one of those blindingly good star turns (as Mackrell goes on to say, “She performs classics such as ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ as if she lived every phrase and every note”). It was on this stage, of course, that the always-captivating Cook marked her 70th birthday a decade ago; last October, her 80th was celebrated with a return to Carnegie Hall (where her second concert career was so memorably ignited in 1975) and then in December in London at the Coliseum.

I wrote an appreciation of her for the programme of that performance, and said, “I may have missed Broadway’s so-called ‘golden age’ that stretched roughly from the 40s to the early 60s, but at least I’m not missing Barbara Cook’s golden years. As the leading ingénue of her day, she was, of course, an integral part of that golden age, appearing in the original Broadway companies of such shows as Plain and Fancy, Candide, The Music Man and She Loves Me, as well as more collectable flops such as Flahooley, The Gay Life and The Grass Harp. But it was her reinvention, with a now-legendary Carnegie Hall concert in 1975, that ushered in a new era of appreciation of her extraordinarily rich talent that has turned her into the world’s foremost exponent and interpreter of the great American songbook, both classic and newly-minted.”

It was luxury casting indeed to have Cook on hand (and in exultant voice) last night to offer four haunting Gershwin songs. It was quite a contrast, of course, to the last place I saw her sing live, when I caught her in the tiny Cafe Carlyle in New York back in April; but as she told me when I interviewed her last week ahead of this show, “I approach the work in exactly the same way, whether it’s at the Royal Albert Hall with 5000 seats or the Carlyle with 85 or 90. I try to bring the songs I sing alive, in the sense that songs all have a kind of story. There’s a particular character saying those lines, and I try to get inside of them.”

In the process, she takes us inside of herself and her own emotions and history. “What is interesting to me is when whatever work you are doing is filtered through your own life story. That way it can’t be like anybody’s else’s - because there’s only one you, if you filter it through your own personal history, there can be no competition - and it makes it very liberating.”

If only the rest of last night’s show was as personal and unique. Too much of it struck me as generic and oddly flavourless. An extended staged dance version of An American in Paris made me long for a theatrical choreographer like Susan Stroman to tackle it; but I also got to wondering why we’ve not had a full-length stage musical version of this show yet? In fact, it turns out, there is one playing at Houston’s Alley Theatre right now.

All credit, nevertheless, to producer Raymond Gubbay, who seems to know exactly what his public wants - and gives it to them. Capitalising on the popular success of Strictly Come Dancing, for instance (which the title of this show, of course, references), we had a ballroom duo from that series, Darren Bennett and Lilia Kopylova, as guests, too.

No wonder the place was packed to the rafters - paying a price scale that properly reflects it as a luxury buy, but not an excessive one: tickets are lower than for most West End musicals, ranging from £19.50 to £52.50. The West End musical, meanwhile, was represented by another piece of luxury casting: Gareth Valentine, who has turned himself into the maestro of the showbiz conducting baton; as Mackrell said in her review, his conducting is “a dance performance in itself as he bounces and boogies exuberantly along with the music.”

And if the dancers don’t always match that degree of infectious enthusiasm - though tap-dancing duo Paul Robinson (the Olivier nominated star of the National Theatre’s transfer of the West Yorkshire Playhouse production of SIngin’ in the Rain in 2000) and Douglas Mills rather strenuously try to - it’s always a pleasure, naturally, to hear George Gershwin’s ravishing music — and always chastening to know that he completed this amazing body of work before he died at the age of just 38.