Something new is happening in the West End. Just up the road from Thriller and down a bit from Les Misérables a billboard the colour of weak tea (positively consumptive compared to the full-colour, neon assaults on either side) proclaims the arrival of Richard III and Twelfth Night. Shakespeare is back on Shaftesbury Avenue, and this time he means business – big, commercial business. How has this sleight of hand been achieved?

As long as Simon Callow is around, London’s theatre scene will never be short of one-man shows, nor of Shakespeare. A new pretender to the Shakespearian throne, a rival for the hollow crown (and, just occasionally, the hollow laugh) has however emerged in the form of Roger Rees’s What You Will – a brisk hour-and-a-half’s trot through Shakespeare’s greatest hits, with a little autobiography and a lot of accents thrown in.

Being in a comedy double act is like being in a marriage. Except, as half of a humorous twosome once told me, with less sex. There are ups and downs and the chances of splitting are high. The push-pull tensions of the double act are explored in Neil Simon's The Sunshine Boys, first seen on Broadway in 1972, then famously on film in 1975 with Walter Matthau and George Burns. Thirty years on from its premiere, is the magic still there?

David Cameron could hardly wish for a more apt musical to pep up the people’s spirits than Irving Berlin’s Top Hat, with its wheedling entreaties about the advantages of being caught in the rain, or putting on your best front, and all. Matthew White’s staging of Top Hat - said to be the first-ever theatrical version of the immortal 1935 Astaire and Rogers movie - is finely timed for a grim (and rainy) summer, with a smart and spirited production that pretty much puts the film on stage, making the best of what look like austerity budgets.

We’ve seen a few American film and TV actresses grace the West End stage with surprising potency, but no one surely will surpass Laurie Metcalf for profound emotional truth-telling in Eugene O’Neill’s shattering family drama, given an unbeatably cast new production in London’s West End. Metcalf's by no means famous over here now, so long after her brilliant stint in Roseanne Barr's Nineties sitcom, but this is one of those performances you won't forget, up there in the Vanessa Redgrave class.

The cultural triumvirate of the Hallé Orchestra, the Royal Exchange Theatre and The Lowry have joined forces for this new production of the 1953 hit musical Wonderful Town. Leonard Bernstein would surely have been a happy man to hear his score, dashed off in a mere five weeks at short notice, played by the 65-strong Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir Mark Elder, who has been nursing the ambition to do the show here since he saw the 2004 Broadway production.  

Fisher has pizzazz and a gift for comedy

Gregory Doran was today named the incoming artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he will succeed Michael Boyd in the post later this year. The announcement came as no surprise given Doran's longstanding commitment to an organisation that he first joined as an actor in 1987, before shifting careers to rise up through the RSC ranks as director (and occasional writer, as well).

Melodrama is not something we accept easily these days, tittering gently as the gore runs, moving restlessly in our seats as heroes or villains declaim to the gallery. So all the more odd, on the surface, that Sweeney Todd is the most popular of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals. On the surface. Because, under the melodramatic posturing, Sondheim creates a cold, hard, bleak world.

Was it the players, or the play, that has made a phenomenon out of One Man, Two Guvnors, the prize-winning comedy now on its third London theatre and preparing to hop the pond to Broadway next month? Well, bacon and eggs(!), it turns out there’s life aplenty in Richard Bean’s Goldoni rewrite yet, even without the star wattage of James Corden and the insanely arched eyebrows of Oliver Chris.

“Winsome” isn’t a word you hear very often these days. The taint of coy, simpering campery already hung about it in the 1920s when Noël Coward gave it a starring role in the after-dinner word-charades of his hit Hay Fever. Yet now (as then) it’s a word that speaks to precisely the brand of giddy, self-conscious charm Coward’s play so determinedly exerts. Howard Davies’s new production splashes gaily about in the work’s theatrical shallows, giggling, posing and romping with the skill of a Monte Carlo ingenue.