Let's not make a song and dance about Mike Tyson's dream of singing and dancing in musicals "The wortht delivery," as Tyson lisped it, "in the hithtory of speeching." Perhaps the most surprising element to Tyson's belated discovery of his artistic soul is that, on reflection, it isn't all that surprising after all. Although once and long dismissed as a raging Caliban of a dunce, he always struck me as a very bright and sensitive man who had been desensitised by his unspeakably brutal Brooklyn childhood. He grew up to commit a crime for which there is no semblance of an excuse. But those who styled him a monster long before he did time for rape and mistook Evander Holyfield's earlobe for an energy snack seemed too glibly to disregard the dehumanising effects of watching his mother die in screaming agony from untreated cancer, and being viciously bullied by older boys who tore the heads of his beloved pigeons and taunted him, thanks to that lisp, as "fairy boy." Those bullies may now wonder whether his nickname was devolved from the cockney rhyming slang term "Iron hoof," such is the stereotyping of the male hoofer. Published in Wednesday's Daily Mail, for example, was this sentence concerning the dancer, choreographer and Strictly judge Bruno Tonioli's flirtation, long ago, with hallucinogens. "He eventually found himself crying in a cinema," it revealed of the occasion Tonioli emerged from an LSD-induced blackout, "watching repeat screenings of Barbra Streisand's musical comedy Hello, Dolly!, still wrapped in a fur coat." Could it get any gayer than that? As one of the most infamously straight men alive, Tyson would probably be secure enough to take roles from which previous ex-fighters who tried their luck as actors might have baulked. Jake LaMotta played a barman in the film noire classic The Hustler, and a later middleweight champion took the same route, though I've never seen a Marvelous Marvin Hagler movie or met anyone who has. Yet only Tyson, one feels, would take the lead in Les Cage Aux Folles. Whether any boxing champ has ever before become a star of musicals on the Broadway or West End stage is unlikely (metamorphoses of the kind tend not to evade the notice). But lack of precedent is no reason to assume that it cannot be done, or that Tyson wouldn't knock "em dead as Captain Von Trapp (he would hardly need the whistle to bring those kids to order), The Producers's Max Bialystock, or even - cast to type here given his track record as a voice coach - Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. One thing in all this confusion does at least seem plain. Reasoning that even if he has changed, he hasn't changed that much, even the bravest theatre critics such as our own Charles Spencer will pull their punches if Mike Tyson floats like a butterball turkey in the dance numbers, and sings like a B Forsyth.