THIS week is the last chance to see Nikolai Foster's winter-warming White Christmas after its West Yorkshire Playhouse run was extended by seven days.

Not that you will have to wait long for the next Foster show in Yorkshire because the second leg of Calamity Jane's national tour will arrive at the Grand Opera House, York, on February 10 with Jodie Prenger leading Foster's cast on the Deadwood Stage.

Foster, meanwhile, is moving on to the next stage of a career that has combined multiple productions in London and regionally with directorial attachments at the Sheffield Crucible and Royal Court Theatre and National Theatre Studio in London and an associate directorship at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds.

The North Yorkshireman, from Skipton, takes over as artistic director of the Leicester Curve this month, a chance to settle down after his peripatetic passage through Britain's theatres that brought him to York Theatre Royal for The Diary Of Anne Frank in February 2012.

Irving Berlin's White Christmas has been another landmark show for Foster, whose refreshing 2011 Playhouse reinvention of the Broadway musical Annie – the first new version in ten years – will be touring throughout 2015.

"White Christmas was never produced on stage until the mid-1990s, a long time after the 1954 film, " says Nikolai.

"A jukebox musical premiered in New York in 1999 and then came over to Britain, and that production played the Dominion in London this winter, but we were very kindly granted permission to do our brand new production with new orchestrations. This is a very rare thing and we're deeply honoured to be doing it."

Foster's show opens on the Second World War battlefield, a scene far removed from what follows under bright television studio lights and at a glitzy ski resort.

"We wanted to give it integrity, so it feels like we're really earning the later part of the show, the razzmatazz part, while giving the show its political backbone," says Nikolai.

"Our first rendition of White Christmas comes on the battlefield, so immediately you're forced to see it differently, not as a saccharine fable around a Christmas fire, but as a song of hope for American servicemen, praying that they will arrive home safely. It becomes almost a hymn that's hugely inspiring."

Not only Jason Carr's jazz-inspired score, performed by a seven-piece band on stage, has freshened up White Christmas. Typical of Foster's instinct for bravura theatre-making was his casting of Darren Day in the Bing Crosby role of song-and-dance charmer Bob Wallace.

"I remembered when I was coming through my teens, Darren was making his name in his 20s, and when we met last year on a project I was blown away by his energy and his talent and thought he should lead the company," he says.

"He's been everything that I thought he would be: he has real charisma and stage craft."

White Christmas, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until Saturday; box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk. Calamity Jane, Grand Opera House, York, February 10 to 14, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm, Thursday and Saturday; 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york