Pénombre, penumbra: "The partially shaded region around the shadow of an opaque body, when the light source is larger than a point source and only part of its light is cut off (contrasted with the full shadow or umbra)." Pénombre, penumbra: "An area where shade blends with light; a shadowy area." Pénombre, penumbra: "A faint intimation of something undesirable; a peripheral region of uncertain extent; a group of things only partially belonging to some central thing." So even as we start, we are already in the shadows.

Catalan dance is one of Sadler’s Wells’ themes this spring, though I’d love to know how much of what Tap Olé does can really be called Catalan - this is a tap fusion company that owes its germination to Riverdance, Tap Dogs and the efforts in New York recently to revive rhythm tap. Attaching tap class skills to Spanish guitar makes what’s on at the Peacock this week more a tap show in a tourist-trail tapas bar than a theatrical dance production worth a detour.

It’s Holy Wednesday in Cuenca, and going round the corner into Cathedral Square I’m surrounded by hordes of guys in multicoloured mufti who look like the Ku Klux Klan, with unnecessarily pointy hoods. Twenty of them are carrying a heavy float with a large statue of Jesus on it. In Cuenca things are fairly austere, compared to other places where there’s a lot of self-whipping, or where, if you have sin on your conscience, you may end up banging nails into your hands, as in Mexico. Still there are alternative amusements – the Copa Del Rey final of Real Madrid v Barcelona is blaring out of bars – and it’s the 50th edition of Cuenca’s Religious Music Festival.

Verdi’s Il Trovatore, the WNO season brochure assures us, “is Italian opera at its most passionate and full-blooded”. But you could sit through this revival of Peter Watson’s seven-year-old production and overlook the fact. Always understated (to put it kindly), with age it has retreated further into its shell. The singers face front and largely ignore one another; the soldiers seem to have taken orders from the latest tottering Middle Eastern tyrant not to fire on their own people. There are no flames to trouble Azucena’s conscience; no blood, not much passion.

It is a crowded market for primate reunions at the moment. In the same week that Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz announced that they are hardnosing the highway again minus Mike Nesmith, the original line-up of eighties pop nuts The Blow Monkeys release an all-new album. While the former will no doubt opt for pure nostalgia on their forthcoming tour, the latter, led as ever by Dr Robert, aka Robert Howard, are rather more creative.

There are gifted dancers and there are creatures of the stage. You know the difference immediately. The latter have something shamanic about them, ageless at any age, almost eccentric in their power. Eva Yerbabuena is one of those very rare creatures, to whom I succumb as helplessly as a rabbit in front of a cobra.

Yes, the Sky 1 drama department is trying to elbow some room on the national sofa and their policy with Mad Dogs is to cast it to the very hilt. Thus John Simm, Philip Glenister, Max Beesley and Marc Warren, playing four old lags who’ve sort of lost touch over the years, board a plane for Spain, summoned for a nostalgic bunfight by another compadre.

Every February the Sadler’s Wells flamenco festival summons the illusion of Spanish sun onto our chilled, grateful backs - this year singers are getting almost as much prominence as dancers. But what sun, I ask, at Estrella Morente’s dark, often remote evening, opening the fortnight last night? (And why, still, after years of urgent requests, no subtitles for these pungently melodramatic lyrics?)

I am far from the first - and in very good company - to worry about the over-commercialisation of flamenco. As far back as in 1922 Manuel de Falla and Federico Garcia Lorca, respectively Spain’s greatest composer and poet of the time, decided to organise a singing competition in Granada in which only singers from the villages were allowed to enter. The polished, preening urban stars of the Café Cantantes were ineligible. My resistance to the genre was partly to do with the Gypsy Kings, amusing enough when you first heard them, but irritating beyond words when heard for years in every wine bar in the world.