She's less happy singing sentimental material higher up the register.She doesn't get away with everything. "You Belong To Me", a duet with her musical director Robert Martin, sounds like one of those awful moments in a doomed love affair montage in a fifth-rate movie, but when she switches back to clowning around or slides through a lazy croon of "Blue Moon", everyone is happy. And if you don't believe me, take a (brief) look at her in Bogdanovich's 1975 clunker, the Cole Porter compilation movie At Long Last Love. No, this dame's much happier getting down to a little light rock, heating up "Mama's Cooking". "There's an official 12 drink minimum," she announces "The more you drink, the better I sound." She needn't worry. Alcohol or no, the packed room is more than happy to listen to her strut her stuff. Her smartest move is that she doesn't take herself seriously, and boy, is that rare on the cabaret circuit, overstocked as it is with would-be smouldering chanteuses.

It's a regular ratings winner and Cybill gets to do for the older single woman what Mary Tyler Moore did for the younger Sixties version And now she's in cabaret. Can she sing? Well, she wings her way through "Nice Work If You Can Get It" over the opening credits of Cybill every week, but the Gershwin song does her no favours. Nice enough, but the light swing you need for Thirties show songs isn't her strong suit. She made a handful of movies but despite shining in Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the cinema tired of her dangerously vapid charm. In 1985, TV beckoned her with Moonlighting and she was reborn. Then, in the Nineties, she won the ultimate American seal of approval: a TV sitcom bearing her name.

Long before Peter Bogdanovich turned her into a film star playing the flatlands, small-town slut in The Last Picture Show, her all-American face graced endless magazine covers and TV commercials. My body's polyphonic - a one- man orchestra, a 360-degree dancer - and my mind is just exhilarated by the possibilities."Trisha Brown Company perform 'MO', 'If You Couldn't See Me' and 'Set and Reset' tonight/ Sat, Brighton Theatre Royal (01273 328 488); 21 May, Edinburgh Festival Theatre (0131-529 6000); 24/25 May, QEH, London (0171- 960 4242); 28/29 May, Newcastle Theatre Royal (0191-232 2061); 3/4 June, Blackpool Grand (01253 28372). Cybill Shepherd has had more careers than other people have jobs. Brown based the stop-start quality of Madden's phrases on the dancer's experience of running down a mountain. And, like the music, the dance frequently breaks off in mid-sentence, only to hang in the air before reactivating and retracing itself. Of the dancers in Brown's current line-up only Madden will be familiar to British audiences. Her one-time contemporaries, like Stephen Petronio, Lance Gries, Randy Warshaw and Eva Karczag - upon whom works such as Newark and Set and Reset were forged - have long departed.

But Brown has repopulated her company with a clutch of able and charismatic performers. She has also entered a new phase in her own dancing - now more voluptuous, sure-footed and authoritative than ever - at an age when, as she herself points out, "you might think I'd be exiting rather than entering one. But I have so much more conscious knowledge of what I'm doing. Brown did not want the audience to notice dancers entering the space, so she created a series of commotions in order to distract the eye.At the heart of the work is a solitary figure (originally Diane Madden) who jogs in figure-eight floor patterns to Alvin Curran's Satiesque score of limpid, repeated fragments.