If a great whorl of bubblegum were plonked on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth all summer long, would there be any point in complaining about it? How do you criticise the uncriticisable? A new Much Ado About Nothing at Wyndham's is Shakespeare-by-television: failsafe. As theartsdesk has recently pointed out, there is the "other production" at the Globe, which celeb chatter over and vast publicity for this brassy West End one have conspired to relegate to a sideshow somewhere obscure south of the Thames.

This Saturday we’ve a new recording of a famous Russian symphony played by an Italian orchestra under their London-based principal conductor. There’s a rare Shakespearean opera written in the 1950s by a Swiss master using a German text. And a Scottish composer celebrates his 60th birthday with an invigorating collection of piano and chamber works.

Everybody’s talking about Much Ado About Nothing. At dinner tables, the pub and on the Bakerloo Line the only cultural conversation to be overheard having is whether David Tennant and Catherine Tate will be as wonderful as we all want them to be as Shakespeare’s feuding lovers Beatrice and Benedick. Their West End show opens next week, and among all the hype and headlines another production (and it was always going to be the “other production”) has quietly opened down at Bankside – a show with such warmth and knockabout energy that if Tate and Tennant are not very brilliant indeed they may find themselves outpaced.

The staging smacks of Covent Garden's familiar Verdi-by-numbers - surprising since it's the often inventive Phyllida Lloyd's concept, revived by Harry Fehr, but it might as well be the inert pageantry of Elijah Moshinsky - while the necessary singing-acting, no doubt as a result, is mostly one-dimensional and overcooked. Verdi's first confident shot at music-theatre, revised for Paris in 1864 but already vivid in outline four years before Rigoletto broke the mould, deserves better. At least it enjoys firm-of-purpose conducting by Antonio Pappano and one vocal performance of unflagging brilliance.

Just think, said a veteran enthusiast of Britten's operas when I showed him the earliest publicity designs for Christopher Alden's production, you could set them all in a school, even Gloriana - what about headmistress Bess and head prefect Essex? But could you squidge everything into the one shape, I wondered? At ENO, it makes instant sense in the composer's near-perfect musical translation of Shakespearean wood magic that Oberon is the schoolmaster who prefers changeling pre-pubescents to now-adolescent, discarded Pucks. That's the strongest of starting points.

The Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre has always been one of London’s theatrical success stories, attracting luminaries from Flora Robson to Judi Dench, but over the past few years under the stewardship of artistic director Timothy Sheader, it has really come into its own. In 2010, its Olivier Award-winning production of Into the Woods became the highest-grossing production in the venue's history, whilst The Crucible by Arthur Miller attracted a whole new audience to the theatre – 72 per cent of those who attended the play had never visited the theatre before – and The Comedy of Errors became its most successful Shakespeare play to date.

Has the King of Knotty Ash been usurped? I saw him embrace Shakespeare and play Malvolio here just 40 years ago. I’m talking about Ken Dodd, more used to playing the fool. Now, another upstart from Knotty Ash is even more ambitiously playing the King of Scotland. I’m talking about David Morrissey. No fool he.

John Ford’s tragedy‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, set in the Italian city of Parma, tells the story of a young brother and sister, Giovanni and Annabella, who discover a mutual love for each other and embark on a passionate sexual relationship. The challenges of family, church and society increasingly curtail their freedom to pursue their desires, and the play culminates in a terrifyingly brutal and bloody climax. When Ford wrote the play, probably in the late 1620s, he was in his forties and was nearing 50 when it was published in 1633. The play is so often talked about as if the work of a rebellious, youthful writer, keen to shock, whereas it is more accurately viewed as a considered portrayal of a complex sexual relationship by a mature author. It is revived this week by West Yorkshire Playhouse.

This week we’ve offbeat violin and viola duets played by a renowned husband-and-wife duo, Scarlatti keyboard sonatas played on piano, and a very Italian take on Shakespeare from one of the 20th century’s fieriest conductors.

Trust the "wooden O" to set the Shakespearean record straighter than usual. In John Dove's production, this is no problem play but a bright comedy where the immaculate plotting proves more admirable than its questionable characters. Its low cuddleability quotient will never make All's Well everyman's favourite; the heroine has Rosalind's or Viola's resourcefulness and none of their charm as she pursues a callow, snobbish young man whom you can't at first blame for feeling cornered but who ends up an irredeemable cad. The figure of fun despised by everyone else in the play, the mouthy Parolles, is the only chief candidate for our affections; so it was a foregone conclusion that the Globe actor with the best track record in energetic comedy, James Garnon, would steal the show.