While dancing at the Palais Royale in Akron, Ohio, Bubbles, a cynical blonde chorine, and Judy O'Brien, an aspiring young ballerina, meet Jimmy Harris, the scion of a wealthy family.

Back in New York, Bubbles finds work in a burlesque club, while Madame Basilova, the girls' teacher and manager, arranges an audition for Judy with ballet impresario Steve Adams.

En route to the audition, Madame Basilova is run over by a car and killed, and Judy, intimidated by the other dancers, flees before she can meet Steve.

Aiming for musical authenticity, studio music head Dave Dreyer used a variety of instrumentalists: 50 studio players for the big ballet, but then the Leon Taz South American tango band for the Club Ferdinand, a "Negro jive band of 12 pieces" for the Palais Royale chorus number, and a "mixed orchestra of 25 pieces for the Bailey Brothers Burlesque sequence.

[5][6] Writing for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther panned the film, noting that, "with the exception of Maureen O'Hara, who is sincere but badly miscast, the roles are competently filled and the film pretentiously staged, Dance, Girl, Dance is just a cliché-ridden, garbled repetition of the story of the aches and pains in a dancer's rise to fame and fortune.

It has lots of dancing, both high and low class, with Maureen scaling the heights as it were and Lucille Ball niftily impersonating a lowbrow terpsichore....the two so different madiens are excellently played....Supporting players are able and alert.

"[8] TIME magazine wrote: "'Dance, Girl, Dance' solemnly relates a jumbled account of the trials & tribulations borne by pretty showgirls.

"[9] The Atlanta Constitution singled out Ball's work: "Burlesque nearly got back in Atlanda yesterday—and, cleaned up enough to pass screen censors, it did.

The new queen of the disrobing art is Lucille Ball, whose act is no more shocking than the wind machines at Coney Island....Her performances of the tough, anti-puritan show girl who believes in eating should put her name in line for better pictures.

"[10] For the New York Sun, the film was "a pleasant enough piece of entertainment....[it] goes a little haywire sometimes in the emotional scenes, probably because the beautiful Maureen O'Hara seems to have learned nothing at all about acting.

This idealistic paean to the higher realms of creative and romantic fulfillment is harshly realistic about the degradations that women endure in base entertainments.