The four-week Spring Dance season at the Coliseum, a new event in London’s calendar, has come in contrasted halves. First, it showcased two big ballet companies, New York City and Stuttgart. Now it has gone personal, so to speak, with a two-part focus on the phenomenon that is Carlos Acosta - one of the best-known names in ballet today.

Last week was a potpourri, with guest artists from the Royal Ballet; this week, the star draws on his Cuban roots with Carlos in Cuba.

My mind went back 30 years or so, to those seasons in this same theatre called Nureyev and Friends. Nureyev was a legend, the most famous male dancer of that time; someone you had to see. When he was at his best, you never forget what you saw. (He did, of course, go on too long.) Acosta is another must-see, hence the big audiences he attracts, and he is at his peak. Remember, though, that he is 35. It can’t go on for ever.

It is not just his superlative dancing that makes him special - the fact that he is black makes him special in another way, as a role model in classical ballet. Then there’s his personal history: the son of a poor family, saved from delinquency by being sent to ballet school; seeing a future and seizing a challenge; determined to be the best and becoming it.

What is also appealing about Acosta is that his stage glamour is accompanied by perfect manners and modesty - he does not hog the show. His programme with colleagues from the Royal Ballet feels like a gathering of friends, because this is the company he has danced with for a decade, and he shares out the opportunities. Yet this sense of intimacy and consistently strong dancing can’t disguise the fact that, with 12 items on the bill, mostly duets and solos, the evening feels bitty - more so at the Coliseum than on its first showing at Sadler’s Wells in 2006.

Acosta and Lauren Cuthbertson, an aristocratic pair, were very fine in the brilliant convolutions of Balanchine’s Agon duet (though she hasn’t the “steel” of Zenaida Yanowsky, who withdrew from the event). Sarah Lamb was a delicate Sylph and Valeri Hristov an ardent James in the Act II pas de deux from La Sylphide. Mara Galeazzi and Martin Harvey emoted melodramatically in Mac-Millan’s Winter Dreams duet. In Fokine’s The Dying Swan (the piece that will not go away), Lamb fluttered her arms beautifully, but didn’t convince me. Then, in the virtuoso show stopper, Vaganova’s Diana and Actaeon pas de deux, Acosta and Tamara Rojo were a terrific duo: she with dazzling fouettés; he in a miniskirt and little else, soaring and twisting with effortless bravura.

The second half brought Rojo back, ultra-sexy in a black bobbed wig, for a slinky tango number with José Martin; Lamb, sleek and slick in a cabaret number to Edith Piaf; and Acosta as a witty drunk, throwing off astonishing feats in a casual manner, to Jacques Brel. Cuthbertson, in red pants and a crinoline frame, danced a mystifying, skittish solo to Monteverdi, choreographed by Will Tuckett. There were another two duets that both felt abstract-generic, and in which you had to take the choreographers’ intentions on trust (one about the last two people on earth, the other about Fonteyn and Nureyev).

Majisimo, by the Cuban choreographer Georges Garcia, makes a rousing show-closer, to ebullient music by Massenet, for eight dancers: classical numbers with a Spanish flavour, stylish, elegant, zippy. Lamb and Acosta are the splendid leading couple, but this is very much an ensemble piece - the only one on the programme. The evening could have done with another for better balance.

Acosta frames the show by having the cast stroll on at the start to warm up and put on costumes amid backstage clutter, then do the reverse at the end, with similar glimpses between items, while gauzes go up and down. This is not a good idea - it makes for clunking progress and needs a rethink.

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette