Beautiful, shy, charming and talented, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a shining star who streaked across the New York skyline for a few brief years in the early 1980s before a heroin overdose claimed his life at the age of only 27. 

Of Sondheim’s half-dozen masterpieces, Follies is the one which sets the bar impossibly high, both for its four principals and in its typically unorthodox dramatic structure. The one-hit showstoppers from within a glittering ensemble come thick and fast in the first half – stop the show they certainly did last night – and it’s hard not to miss all that when the camera zooms in exclusively on the quarrelling quartet.

The death of Walter Becker last weekend brings to an end one of the great double acts of rock history. Becker’s partnership with Donald Fagen, with whom he created Steely Dan, has left a legacy of music which seems destined to be at least as imperishable as the classic jazz and soul artists who inspired them.

When you’re next strolling through Washington Square Park, or SoHo, or the West Village, you can thank Jane Jacobs that those New York neighbourhoods have survived (though she'd blanch at the price of real estate). Four-lane highways almost dissected and ruined them in the mid-Fifties, but her grass-roots activism saved those higgledy-piggledy streets.

Production gloss and deliberation are not notions immediately springing to mind while pondering the 1976-era Ramones. Even so, this new edition of their second album, the ever-wonderful Leave Home, reveals that careful consideration was given to how they presented themselves on record.

First introduced into the burgeoning “Marvel Cinematic Universe” in last year’s Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland’s incarnation of Spider-Man is another triumph for this exuberant franchise (even if some might feel a pang for the fine and still-recent pairing of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone under director Marc Webb's helmsmanship).

Opera-lovers coming to St Martin's Lane may feel confused to be confronted by an unrecognisable Coliseum, which now has huge girder-like structures adorning the stage and ceiling and a rather ugly skyscraper looming out of the wings, called Falco Tower.

“You’re like a drowning man trying to wave at an ocean liner,” says lawyer Philip (Michael Sheen) to his uncle Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere as you’ve never seen him before – a revelation). “But I’m a good swimmer,” replies Norman, feverishly making notes on a napkin. Swimming, for Norman, means trying to network his way around New York City’s biggest Jewish names and make a deal.

Forty years after Annie swept on to Broadway, brimming with shining-faced optimism amidst wearying times, along comes Nikolai Foster's West End revival of the show to do much the same today. A tentative-seeming Miranda Hart may be the name player, making her musical theatre debut in the role created by Broadway legend Dorothy Loudon.

On 8 April 1952, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green were chatting to Charlie Chaplin at a party when he started raving about a picture he’d seen the previous night at Sam Goldwyn’s house. It was called Singin’ in the Rain – had they heard of it? “Heard of it? We wrote it!” But then, this dynamic duo had form: five years earlier they wrote On the Town.