There’s a lot of going back to the future in theatres just now - shows (like this one) postponed by 18 months or so and delayed still further by co-star Roger Bart being indisposed on press night are bringing the bright lights back to the West End.

Much has happened in the five years since your reviewer braved the steep rake at The Other Palace and saw The Last Five Years (not least my now getting its “Nobody needs to know” nod in Hamilton – worth a fistful of Tonys in prestige, I guess) so it’s timely to revisit Jason Robert Brown’s musical.

Let it snow! The Broadway musical adaptation of the Disney film behemoth Frozen premiered back in 2018 and now, following Covid delays, a rejigged version finally makes its home in the West End – to the delight of the army of miniature Elsas in attendance.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks has always suffered from not being Mary Poppins, the movie delayed in development and released in 1971 (it is a Sixties film in tone and technology) and always seeming to appear later on the BBC’s Christmas Disney Time programmes, after a bit of Baloo boogieing and a spoonful or two of sugar. It was probably more liked than loved.

Belleville has lost its Prince Charming and, when his statue is graffitied, it loses its long held title as the most beautiful town, too. Its people fear the impact on their livelihoods and soon identify the gobby, gothy girl as the culprit – they go after Cinderella with actual pitchforks!

You've got to hand it to the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park: this venue never simply dusts off a familiar musical title and plonks it onstage.

"Times have changed", we're informed in the cascadingly witty title number of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes, now in revival at the Barbican and bringing with it a pandemic-clearing tsunami of joy.

We’ve come to learn what socially distanced means but, 72 years ago, the distance that concerned Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers was that between racial groups in the United States. With a catalogue of hits behind them, they turned to South Pacific, and fashioned a velvet glove comprising some of musical theatre’s greatest songs into which they packed an iron fist of a condemnation of prejudice – popular entertainment with an uncompromising message.

If Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1966 was anyone under the age of 25, why couldn’t a teenage student write a musical in 1967? There are plenty of answers to that question of course, none of which stopped the composer Stephen Schwartz, who conjured Pippin while still at Carnegie Mellon University.

It’s a wonderful thing to hear a nine-piece Broadway-style band at full pelt, and to see real show dancing – the first time for me, in both cases, since early 2020.