Review: The Girl I Left Behind Me ****

With her naughty skits of girls who loved soldiers, music hall star Vesta Tilley was the most famous of male impersonators.

Evoking Vesta and other bygone ladies who preferred to tread the boards in men's clothing in Opera North's The Girl I Left Behind Me, Jessica Walker proves herself a worthy addition to their trouser-wearing ranks.

Playful and knowing in the best cabaret style, The Girl I Left Behind Me teases with

its ideas of illusion and possibility. Deftly blurring the boundaries between opera and music hall, high and low culture and – inevitably – masculine and feminine, it is also a wittily beguiling evening's entertainment.

Directed by the visionary Neil Bartlett, it conveys a thought-provoking wealth of stories and ideas with the lightest of touches as Walker, suited and booted in full gentleman's eveningwear, slipped on the hats, and into the personae, of various male impersonators who have passed, largely forgotten, into theatrical history.

Walker's rich mezzo soprano was equally suited to snippets of Mozart and Strauss as it was to risqu music hall numbers as she evoked cross-dressers from opera to vaudeville. Her singing talent was complemented by the storytelling skills of a true soubrette. She was particularly spiffing as a squiffy toff.

James Holmes, Opera North's outstanding head of music until 2008, provided piano accompaniment, tinkling the ivories with a stylish pizzazz that added to the feel that the Howard Assembly Rooms had been transformed, for the duration of the show, into a slightly shady, late-night, supper club.