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.

Phone rings, door chimes, in comes Company, this time sporting surround sound and high definition and at a cinema near you. Tonight marks a rare opportunity to see a New York gala - the sort of event that proliferates in Manhattan even as the actual volume of Broadway openings decreases - with an assemblage of names that you could never get to commit for an extended run. All that and Broadway diva Patti LuPone at her most pungently acerbic?

A generally grim year for musicals (Matilda and Crazy For You very much excepted) nears a belatedly emotional and rewarding close with the Crucible Theatre's revival of Company, which brings the Sheffield playhouse's artistic director, Daniel Evans, back into the orbit of the man whose work is responsible for his two Olivier Awards.

When West Side Story won 10 Academy Awards, that was back in a Hollywood era during which movie musicals regularly garnered such acclaim.

"Onward we go," the hearty but essentially hapless Wilson Mizner (David Bedella) remarks well into Road Show, the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical that has been slow-aborning, and then some, since it first appeared in workshop form in New York as Wise Guys in 1999. Three titles and two directors later, the same material has been refashioned into the restless, always intriguing, fundamentally incomplete musical now at the Menier Chocolate Factory, the south-London venue whose Sondheim forays to this point (Sunday in the Park with George, A Little Night Music) have generally struck gold.

Does the perfect murder make for the perfect musical? One doesn't have to make undue claims for the work's chamber-size appeal to warm to Thrill Me, the American two-hander that has arrived at the Tristan Bates Theatre as this season's entry in retelling the story of the Chicago killers, Leopold and Loeb. (Last season's was the superb Almeida Theatre revival of Rope, from director Roger Michell.) While getting up close and personal with a show can sometimes magnify its flaws, the intimacy on this occasion allows a real appreciation of the performers, especially newcomer George Maguire, of whom it might fairly be said that a star is born.

The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Love Never Dies emerged empty-handed at the 35th Laurence Olivier Awards, despite seven nominations, but it was a good night for Legally Blonde, Stephen Sondheim, and, so it seemed, pretty well any production lucky enough to play the National's Lyttelton auditorium. And for American playwriting, too, with Clybourne Park following last year's The Mountaintop as a States-side effort that was named Best Play Sunday night at London's equivalent of the Tony Awards.

One expects Shakespeare to be rediscovered afresh on the British stage (if not here, where?), and it was gratifying during 2010 to find the Royal Court - a venue all about the new - raising the authorial bar ever higher via an (almost) unbroken series of triumphs culminating, for me, with E V Crowe's Kin.

Talking to Jude Kelly at the Royal Festival Hall last night, Stephen Sondheim gave a glimpse into his own theory of lyrical composition by contrasting Noël Coward (whom "I intensely dislike") and Cole Porter.