My Spotify Wrapped this year is somewhat at odds with my Album of 2024. A ‘Van Life Folie Americana’ phase of Spring (presumably due to the actual VW trip to the Costa Brava at Easter) followed by the ‘Cinnamon Softcore Art Deco’ moment in early Summer – which I largely owe to Lana del Rey live at Reading Festival prep, has been trumped by an underdog that should Spotify have picked up on, would have read something like ‘Eclectic, Unhinged, Buenos Aires Basement Rave’ chapter.

Broadway shows sometimes hit the West End like, well, like a comet, burning brightly but briefly (Spring Awakening, for example), while others settle into orbit illuminating Shaftesbury Avenue with a neon blaze every night for years.

The Wild Arts Ensemble was founded by Orlando Jopling in 2022 to create a dynamic, pared-back style of performance in which, as he put it, the “costumes, set and props… can be packed up into a couple of suitcases that we can take with us on the train”.

Part of the aim, as with an increasing number of ensembles these days, is to tour in a way that’s more environmentally sustainable, but it’s also resulted in fresh and vivid re-readings of classics that are igniting enthusiasm around the country.

It’s difficult to believe that the last stop-motion Wallace and Gromit short graced our screens way back in 2008. Describing the pair’s new outing as a return to form is unnecessary: this duo never lost it in the first place.

Can men really love each other – without sex? Or, to put it another way, how many different forms of male love can you name? These questions loiter with intent around the edges of Tom Stoppard’s dense history play, which jumps from 1936 to the High Victorian age of the 1870s and 1880s, and is now revived by the Hampstead Theatre starring Simon Russell Beale.

When does a concert become a ceremony? You generally visit the Barbican for art rather than ritual. Yet, during the Academy of Ancient Music’s performance last night, the bulk of a packed house still stood up for the “Hallelujah” that closes the second part of Handel’s Messiah.

How do you refresh a masterpiece? Bringing back his first and still greatest hit, Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne seems to have changed only minor details since its 1995 premiere at Sadler’s Wells. Its core brilliance is untouched.

Kenny Barron’s Beyond This Place is glorious. Whereas I’ve found some of the more talked-about albums of 2024 either been uneven or unfocused – as if attracting debate is more important than just setting out to make a great album – everything just works so well here.

Vanilla Fudge could provoke a strong reaction. Writing about them in 1982, Tom Hibbert – then best-known for his contributions to Smash Hits – said of their February 1968 second album, The Beat Goes On, that “on one side of the bombastic concept LP, Vanilla Fudge summed up the history of music from Mozart, through Cole Porter and Elvis, to The Beatles concluding that it was all worthless.”

It might be a push to call this documentary a feminist slant on Humphrey Bogart, but it wouldn’t quite be a shove. Northern Irish filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson’s work has often concerned itself with identity and gender politics, and her narrative here is framed around the women in Bogart’s life, starting with his aloof, undemonstrative mother, Maud.