The Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester is an irresistible example of the can-do spirit. Less than two years ago the ground floor of a disused mill was being advertised on Gumtree as a storage space. Two actors who had been working as waiters – William Whelton and Joseph Houston – spotted it and, despite having no money, homed in on their chance to realise a dream: to create their own venue for musical theatre.

Forty years after Annie swept on to Broadway, brimming with shining-faced optimism amidst wearying times, along comes Nikolai Foster's West End revival of the show to do much the same today. A tentative-seeming Miranda Hart may be the name player, making her musical theatre debut in the role created by Broadway legend Dorothy Loudon.

On 8 April 1952, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green were chatting to Charlie Chaplin at a party when he started raving about a picture he’d seen the previous night at Sam Goldwyn’s house. It was called Singin’ in the Rain – had they heard of it? “Heard of it? We wrote it!” But then, this dynamic duo had form: five years earlier they wrote On the Town.

Hitting the essence of a Fellini masterpiece in a different medium is no easy task. Try and reproduce his elusive brand of poetic melancholy and you'll fail; best to transfer the characters to a different medium, as the musical Sweet Charity did in moving the action of Le notte di Cabiria from Rome and environs to New York.

We’ve had the pre-release hoopla. We’ve had the gruellingly inevitable backlash. We’ve had, as an additional sideshow, the brief interlude when it was this year’s best picture at the Academy Awards, until it wasn’t.

It used to be said that the devil had all the best music. But the devil seems to have lost his touch in this ghost-story rock musical from Duncan Sheik, composer of the stage version of American Psycho and the award-laden Spring Awakening. If the plot seems familiar, it’s because it is – in essence, anyway. An isolated location. Childhood innocence in peril. Malevolent ghosts with a score to settle.

“Then I’ll kiss her so she’ll know.” At the sound of his ringing voice, the girls part to reveal him standing there, a hapless monument of rumpled charm. The audience relaxes in pleasure as an easeful actor joyfully shows what you can do with a command of textual detail, physicality and, above all, character. The trouble is, the excellent Gavin Spokes is playing not one of the leads but the supporting role of Mr Snow. The downside of a performance this assured is that it shows you exactly what has been missing until now.

Can London support two dance musicals, each one dazzling in a different way? We're about to find out, now that the mother of all toe-tappers, 42nd Street, has set up shop a jeté or two away from where An American in Paris is achieving balletic lift-off.

What’s in a yellow dress? Hope over experience? Reckless confidence? This is a legitimate question when the second big cross-Atlantic people-pleaser hoves into view featuring a girl in a frock of striking daffodil hue. It doesn’t take a degree in semiotics to translate this. Forget the bad stuff, people. C’mon, get happy.

Judy Collins was one of the great folk icons of the 1960s, competing for the spotlight with Joan Baez. Where the latter was instrumental in bringing Bob Dylan to wide prominence, the former was crucial in putting Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen on the musical map. She was first to record their music – on Wildflowers (1967), a seminal collection arranged by Joshua Rifkin, celebrated scholar of Bach, Beatles and Scott Joplin.