In 2016 the Bristol Old Vic turned 250. To blow out the candles, England’s oldest continually running theatre summoned home one of its most splendid alumni.

The vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant first came to the attention of the jazz scene when she won the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz competition in 2010. In 2013, her Mack Avenue Records debut WomanChild garnered a Grammy nomination. Two years later, she picked up her first Grammy Award when her follow-up release For One To Love won Best Jazz Vocal Album.

You haven't lived until you've witnessed Viennese maverick H(einz) K(arl) Gruber – 75 today (3 January, publication day) – speech-singing, conducting and kazooing his way through his self-styled "pandemonium" Frankenstein!!. Composed for chansonnier and chamber ensemble or large orchestra, it's a contemporary classic nearly 40 years young.

Nick Mulvey (b.1984) is a singer-songwriter who draws from a refreshing and unexpected palette of global roots music, modernist classical and electronica.

Like a lot of people, I came late to Peaky Blinders, bingeing on the first two brutal, but undeniably brilliant, series like the proverbial box-set sensation it quickly became.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” In 1976 American anger about the state of the nation was channelled into Network, in which cinema satirised its kid sibling television as vapid and opportunistic. Paddy Chayefsky’s script, directed by Sidney Lumet, starred Peter Finch as Howard Beale, a news anchor who has a nervous breakdown on screen in which he starts preaching and becomes the news. The failing network’s ratings soar, and an ambitious young executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) latches onto his potential to boost the network’s stock value.

An encounter with Homer Flynn is disconcerting as the extent of his involvement in The Residents is unclear. He acknowledges that he speaks for the eyeball-headed quartet whose identities are unknown. As he talks, it's clear he has intimate knowledge of their creative process, their motivations and what they think. He discusses them as “they”. Occasionally the word “we” is used.

“He has something of Dillane about him.” Thus Patrick Marber on David Oakes. “I rate him very highly indeed. One of the very best of his generation.” Audiences at the Theatre Royal Haymarket will be able to judge for themselves this autumn. Oakes, 34, stars opposite Natalie Dormer in Marber’s production of Venus in Fur, a sizzling two-hander by David Ives.

Nikki Amuka-Bird spent the summer in Antigua, swimming and scuba diving and could have claimed to be working. She is playing Ellida in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at the Donmar, in a version directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah transposed to the Caribbean.

Sweden's ackowledged "National Orchestra", the Gothenburg Symphony, left its Chief Conductor post unfilled for four seasons, but now it's finally certain to have let the right one in. Having enjoyed a golden age in the (largely unsung) highest echelons of the European league for 22 years with grand master Neeme Järvi, the GSO enjoyed a burst of sensational if relatively short-lived music-making when its management snapped up Gustavo Dudamel in 2007.