The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. But in Love Life, Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical from 1948, it’s all the same country. The couple whose marriage is at the centre of it all are seen in different eras of US history, and while they hardly age, the country changes vastly.

Into a world of grooming gangs, human trafficking and senior prelates resigning over child abuse cases comes Oliver!, Lionel Bart’s masterly musical. Is its grim tale of workhouses, pickpockets and domestic violence an awkward fit with today’s values? 

This Celine Dion jukebox musical has been a big hit in New York, but crossing The Atlantic can be perilous for any production, so, docked now at the Criterion Theatre, does it sink or float?

Czech theatre theorist Ivo Osolsobě’s tick-list for what constitutes an "authentic" musical is quoted in this release’s booklet. Namely that the songs should advance the narrative and express characters’ feelings, that singing, dancing and acting are integral elements, and that the story is rooted in real life.

Broadway shows sometimes hit the West End like, well, like a comet, burning brightly but briefly (Spring Awakening, for example), while others settle into orbit illuminating Shaftesbury Avenue with a neon blaze every night for years.

There is something deliciously perfect about the timing of The Producers’ arrival at the Menier Chocolate Factory. In these twitchy times, Mel Brooks’s scurrilous Hitler musical lands like a stinkbomb in a parfumerie.

It's second time only quasi-lucky for The Devil Wears Prada, the stage musical adaptation of the much-loved Meryl Streep film from 2006 that nosedived in Chicago a few summers ago and has resurfaced on the West End to see another day.

Refitted with a largely fresh creative team, the show ticks all the boxes that devotees of the movie will want and expect, while never really establishing a reason for being of its own, as Kinky Boots, from the same director (Jerry Mitchell), managed so triumphantly some while back.

Percy Jackson is neither the missing one from Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Michael, nor an Australian Test cricketer of the 1920s, but a New York teenager with dyslexia and ADHD who keeps getting expelled from school. He’s a bit of a loner, too intense to huddle with the geeks, too stubborn to avoid the fights with the jocks, and his mother won’t tell him anything about his absent father. Who turns out to be a Greek god. Could happen to any kid. 

Not just a backstage musical, a backroom musical!

In the 70s, Follies and A Chorus Line took us into the rehearsal room giving us a chance to look under the bonnet to see the cogs of the Musical Theatre machine bump and grind as a show gets on its feet. But what of the other room, the writers’ room, where the ideas emerge mistily and the egos clang in conflict? [title of show] pulls back the curtain behind the curtain, behind the curtain.

Jacques Audiard – creator of such subversive crime dramas and alternative romances as Read My Lips (2001), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009), and Rust and Bone (2012) – isn’t an aficionado of film musicals. But in blending one into his comic Spanish-language trans gangster thriller Emilia Pérez, the 72-year-old director has made the most beautiful aberration of his career.