LAST week's success for Bill Whelan at the Grammy awards, the American music industry's Oscars, where the Riverdance album took the award for "Best Musical Show Album" must have taken the sting out of a recent exceptionally acid attack on the show in the pages of the Boston Globe.

At the end of last year, the Hollywood Reporter decided the show was "absolutely smashing" while the Chicago Tribune saw it as "one of the most unusual and thrilling entertainments of the decade" and the Boston Herald described it as "one dynamite show". Variety recently reported that the show had sold $2 million worth of tickets for its 10-day run in Minneapolis, describing the performance as "spectacularly strong".

But there was one critic for whom the green magic had certainly not worked. When the Boston Globe's critic saw the show, she was a great deal less impressed. "Riverdance is supposed to journey from Dublin to New York but it overshoots and lands in Las Vegas..." Nothing too scathing there, you might say. But scan on and phrases such as "drowns in glitz", "ludicrous narration" and worst of all "tastelessly tarted up" spring to the eye. The critic didn't care for the "multinational diversions" even if they did "dilute the show" while Maria Pages's dancing was seen as "vulgar and contorted".

Meanwhile, when Riverdance reached Sydney this week, it was back to business as usual with repeated standing ovations and half-a-million tickets sold for the 80-show Australian tour.