Forty years on from its beginnings as part of New York's gay lib movement, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is playing to a global, largely straight audience. As the company launches a major UK tour, starting this week at the Peacock Theatre in London, its director of 28 years analyses its longevity.

Few things divide opinion as much as comedy, and we’ve all had the experience of sitting through a film stony-faced while all around collapse with mirth. What tickles you? Erudite Wildean wordplay, or the simple joys of watching a fat bloke fall over? The genius of Mel Brooks’ 1967 incarnation of The Producers is that it ticks so many boxes. There’s something to please (and offend) everyone.

1944 was one hell of a year for Bernstein the composer, with a perfect ballet and a near-perfect musical sharing a general theme of three sailors loose in New York, but nothing else, in their boisterous originality. Perhaps their only equal among Bernstein's works - more contestably – is MASS of 1971, surely his biggest and most resonant score, but hardly a candidate for comparable classicism.

The resplendent partnership of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman – which produced Disney hits Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid – first took root with this 1982 Off-Broadway musical, based on a low-budget Sixties film, about a man seeking love and fortune via a bloodthirsty plant.

I’m still not entirely sure what the full associations of the title of New York playwright Jordan Seavey’s new play – its second element, at least: the first speaks for itself – may be, but with writing this accomplished any such uncertainties fall away.

Louis Couperin: Dances from the Bauyn Manuscript Pavel Kolesnikov (Hyperion)

When Lea is nervous she picks at the skin near the nail of her thumb. When she draws blood the wound repairs instantly because she is a member of the Second Wave endowed with SmartBlood™ and DiamondSkin™. Aside from this tic she is an otherwise apparently perfect lifer in a future New York divided into those who may live up to three hundred and those who can merely hope to attain a hundred at most.

The cataclysm of Donald Trump’s election was like a second 9/11 for the East Coast elite (and not just them, obviously). It was a world turned upside down, the centre couldn’t hold, and, worst of all, why did nobody see it coming?

Iconoclasm, orgasms, and rampant rhetoric are all on irrepressible display in The Wooster Group’s recreation of the 1971 Manhattan debate that pitted Norman Mailer against some of the leading feminists of the day.

Force of Evil is much more than a stunning film noir classic: it’s first and foremost a film about money and power and their tragic power of attraction. Set in the world of the numbers racket in New York, where the big combinations, created by gangsters who've barely gone legit, are pitted against the smaller "banks", or players.