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Premiered last week, former classical ballet star, Peter Schaufuss’s Divas, features glamour trio Edith Piaf (Caroline Petter), Marlene Dietrich (Zara Deakin) and Judy Garland (Irina Kolesnikova). The music is middle of the road popular, the steps classically based modern, the dancers brilliant and judging by the opening night’s standing ovation, the audience very happy indeed.

Each of the three acts, playing at the West End’s Apollo Theatre later this month, is an evocation, an affectionate echo and a brutal send up of an epoch. Petter as Piaf is roughly twice the height of the Parisian sparrow, but in her stunning red dress with a cap of black hair, she has the fatalism of a Sally Bowles. Social disintegration defined by sophisticated despair.

On a two tiered stage, designed by Schaufuss, the company members are outrageous can can dancers, pimps and gigolos – every chance is taken to poke fun at between-the-wars frenzied escapism. All the sound tracks are original recordings and between the two Piafs, one live, one recorded, La vie en rose takes on a new meaning.

The worldly wise evil of World War II’s Nazi Germany is glitteringly exposed as Deakin’s Dietrich slips out of her white fur coat to reveal her blinding and iconic, rhinestone sheath. The dress that for half the world’s population, particularly the ones facing gruesome death on the front line, left everything to the imagination. Falling in Love Again, she hypnotises nations with the minimum of seductive movement against a back projection of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of a great nation and its wilful descent into Hell. The chorus line of camp Gestapo thugs is particularly satisfying, while the two grey clad “modern” 1930s dancers, so absorbed in their own esoteric significance, are still painfully familiar. This sad chapter ends with two young dancers, Agneta Beierholm and 14-year-old Luke Schaufuss (son of Deakin and Peter Schaufuss) facing an unspeakable future as Deakin and Dietrich perform Where have all the flowers gone?

Irina Kolesnikova, star of St Petersburg Ballet Theatre and one of the world’s finest classical dancers, guests as Judy Garland. Hair cropped and darkened and in figure hugging dress, her full blooded performance obliterates all doubt that greatness rises to any challenge. With scarcely more than a week’s rehearsal, her first steps away from Swan Lake carry all the authority and confidence with which we are familiar. And boy, can this girl pout and put it about. Partnered by the excellent and hard working Stefan Wise, Kolesnikova is bewitching in The Boy Next Door, delightful in Meet Me In St Louis, Louis, irresistible in Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart. What a talent. Needless to say her pirouettes are impeccable.

The company looks superb and performs Schaufuss’s inventive dance language with relish and high technical skill. Good will, commitment and pure talent underpin this company. Qualities that may not fit the purist’s arid theories, but it’s a darned sound starting point for a good night out.