Notre Danni de Paris

Walking across the grey, rain-soaked, wind tunnel known as Tottenham Court Road, past a small pizza kiosk and into the Dominion theatre, it is difficult not to feel sorry for Dannii Minogue. Until recently she had been sharing the sun-drenched Monaco penthouse of millionaire racing driver Jacques Villeneuve.

Now it is February, she has split from her Formula One lover, and her name is stuck, upside down (she is Australian), on the door of a dressing room barely big enough for Boris Becker to father a child in. If you move the plants, pull back the shutters, open the windows, stick your shoulders out and twist your neck 180 degrees to face up the glazed brick chasm, you get a hint of what might be natural light; then again, it may be a build-up of pigeon guano on a glass roof.

Ah, the glamour of the West End theatre. Provided, of course, that you view Tottenham Court Road as the West End.

But then Dannii Minogue, soap siren, disco diva and now stage star, is not here for the view or the weather (she says she will return to Monaco because it reminds her of Sydney). She is here to take the female lead of Esmeralda in the West-End musical Notre Dame de Paris.

That is what she is here to talk about and not, warns the publicist, the break-up of her relationship with Jacques Villeneuve. Once upon a time it used to be her breasts that were taboo. For much of the mid-1990s Britain was locked in high-minded debate about Kylie's kid sister's embonpoint and whether she had benefited from the plastic surgeon's art.

So of course, once I am alone with pretty, petite and perfectly proportioned Dannii, her blue eyes, her dark hair and sweet voice (alone, that is, in the company of her make-up artist, her PR and the artistic director for the stage show) I ask about the racing driver. "He introduced me to Notre Dame and played me the music," she says rather sweetly. "It's like a line running through the relationship." She adds, confiding, "he's coming to see me in the show soon", so it sounds as if it has been an amicable split.

The rest, however, is "totally personal", and the tentative mention of her breasts and their mesmerising effect on the tabloids is met with a withering put-down that involves the word "crass", as does the prospect of discussing her earnings for the show.

She professes to loathe doing press, but she is rather good at it. Then again, by now she should be; one forgets that, aged 29, this is her 22nd year in showbiz of one sort or another. She and Kylie wanted to be stars, their mother knew someone at Grundy Television, they went along to the studios for a day and thus two Australian showbiz legends were made. "I started work when I was seven and from 10 to 16 I was on Young Talent Time."

Young Talent Time was an Australian institution that achieved a cult status which must be unique in the English-speaking world. There was a time, apparently not that long ago, when Australia was united every Friday night at 6.30pm to watch child and adolescent performers singing cover versions of popular songs. As a concept for television, Young Talent Time is far out, far far far out. Apparently, young Dannii was famed for her rendition of Madonna's Lucky Star. There is something slightly chilling, albeit in a postmodern and terribly ironic way, about the idea of pre-pubescent Dannii covering early Madonna.

Although it would doubtless be "crass" to ask her to sing a bit of vintage Madge, Dannii is somehow coaxed into singing a line or two from her late Nineties hit, All I want to dooo, All I want to dooo. For a small woman she has a foot-stomping, floor-filling set of vocal chords.