Birmingham Royal Ballet began its autumn season on Wednesday in transatlantic mood. Under the banner Way Out West! - which applies only to Balanchine's Western Symphony - we were offered a triple-bill that included Jerome Robbins' Fancy Free and a Concert Fantasy from David Bintley.

This last is a fine new creation. Its music is Tchaikovsky's Concert Fantasy, the piano blazing and sighing amid the orchestral brouhaha, and Bintley makes it an exercise in tutu'd, Balanchinian classicism: two soloists, Nao Sakuma and Chi Cao, set off by a chorus of 12 couples. It has, in matter of design, a starveling air: white for the principals; muzzy gray for the attendants; a backdrop of watery projections. No decorator is credited, and the piece seems, on first viewing, to demand something braver, more opulent, more light-filled

The best ballets have an unmistakable sense of time and place. If you want to know about the American spirit in the 1940s and 1950s, watch their ballets as well as their movies.

Birmingham Royal Ballet's new Way Out West! triple bill has two classic feelgood ballets on it that are all about those sentimental clichés, sailors on the razzle and the cowboys and bar hostesses of the Wild West. But see what Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine have done with these stock figures in Fancy Free and Western Symphony.

AS originally conceived, Way Out West! the mixed programme that opens Birmingham Royal Ballet’s new season, made a lot of sense. It was to be a celebratory trio of American ballets by two of the country’s greatest choreographers: George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Then one was dropped, and David Bintley, BRB’s artistic director, stepped in with a new classical ballet to fill the gap. His Concert Fantasy has nothing to do with America, but it’s a pleasing contrast to the delightful ballets that do. Bintley has taken Tchaikovsky’s Concert Fantasy for piano and orchestra and fashioned a misty, romantic tutu ballet for 26 of his dancers. It’s a tribute ballet, a love letter to the 19th-century Russian Imperial style, built around a central couple in the Swan Lake mould, she demure and pensive, he worshipful and impetuous. Their lush duet is sensuously crafted and full of classical referencing. The choreography for the ensemble, handsomely deployed, is spiced with a roguish spirit.

The time is long past when Birmingham Royal Ballet gazed enviously on its Covent Garden sibling. What the Midlands company lacked in facilities was compensated for by a strong local fanbase with an uncommonly wide social spread.

BRB took pride in not being posh. However, ever since last year when it acquired a splendidly refurbished theatre, new studios and a state-of-the-art physiotherapy facility, that staunch support has wavered. Empty seats were in evidence on the opening night of the new season, and this despite a triple bill that practically popped its cork with crowd-pleasing fizz. Even the exclamation mark in the title, Way Out West!, began to look a teeny bit desperate

Good-time girls, stetson-hatted ranch-hands, saloon-bar antics: Birmingham Royal Ballet goes Wild West, or so the title of its new season's triple bill would have us believe. In fact, only the concluding ballet, Balanchine's Western Symphony, is set in cowboy country. Fancy Free, Jerome Robbins's precursor of the musical On The Town, takes place in New York, while David Bintley's new Concert Fantasy floats through a British ballet dreamworld

DION DUBLIN HAS THE SHARP-EYED stare of a true marksman. His hunger and temperament is that of a winner. When he removes his training top, he has the body of a finely-tuned athlete. Yet when the Aston Villa striker steps out of the football spotlight, he immerses himself in the fantasy world of The Nutcracker. He’s enchanted by the romance of Romeo and Juliet. He marvels at the elegance of Swan Lake. Football may be his first love, but ballet is his passion.