A year ago, after a deeply disappointing Manon Lescaut at Hackney Empire, I wrote here that English Touring Opera had often excelled in the past, and would do so again. The company hasn’t taken long to prove the point.

Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fourth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The Monkey is a resolutely minor, down and dirty B-movie, relishing cartoon gore and comic excess.

It seems that esteemed former US President George Mullen is subsiding gently into retirement on his luxurious country estate, with a publishing contract for his memoirs if he can ever manage to knuckle down and write them, when fate throws a curve-ball.

In 2013 the American artist, Noah Davis used a legacy left him by his father to create a museum of contemporary art in Arlington Heights, an area of Los Angeles populated largely by Blacks and Latinos. But his Underground Museum faced a problem; it didn’t have any art to put on display and none of the institutions approached by Davis would loan him their precious holdings.

Our humanity is defined not only by our use of language, but also by our sense of the spiritual. Whether you are a believer or not, it’s hard to deny the attractions of religion for billions around the world. Sounds portentous? Yeah. Okay, you’re now in the zone for Beau Willimon’s new play East Is South, currently at the Hampstead Theatre, a work which suggests that the digital world can also be mystical place. 

Dying is easy, comedy is hard, according to the Georgian actor Edmund Kean. Luckily, everybody involved with the much-awarded Hacks understands precisely the creative anguish that top-flight comedy demands, and in its third season the show puts further expanses of clear blue water between itself and the competition.

In his first weeks in office, Harrison Ford’s US president survives an assassination attempt inside the White House, goes to war with Japan and mutates into Red Hulk when he gets mad, trashing said White House with a Stars and Stripes flag-holder. How unrealistically reasonable this looks, you may wistfully think. If only Ford, or a 10-foot monster, was in charge.

Bowling For Soup are celebrating their iconic album, A Hangover You Don’t Deserve, on a fun-filled, energetic tour for its 20^th anniversary. Their sold out stop at Wolverhampton’s Civic Hall was a joy to experience from start to finish, the light-hearted essence of the band evident from the minute we walked in. From comical merch to on-stage banter, the fun was infectious and made for a special evening executed by clear well-seasoned professionals.  

Cyndi Lauper was preceded onstage by a brief video that zipped through her career, which she drily declared was just in case someone was at the gig by mistake. It’s tempting to wonder what an unexpected visitor might have made of this farewell tour, given it shifted from Rabbie Burns mentions to gestures of support for the LGBT+ community, wig changes and, at one point, Lauper climbing up from a trap door wrapped in what looked like percussive body armour.

Perhaps all great music counterpoints and comments on the times, but Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra have been searingly congruent. Before he took up his post as Chief Conductor, there were the extinction whispers of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony the night before lockdown and the fury of VW’s Fourth on the eve of Boris Johnson’s election. Now the aggressive dynamism of Walton’s First raised us out of that sinking feeling as the USA worsens by the day.