This has been a busy season for Off Broadway musicals crossing the pond to London, from Dessa Rose and Dogfight to Forbidden Broadway and See Rock City. But for simplicity of approach coupled with swiftness of emotional attack, Benjamin Scheuer's solo musical The Lion stands apart. That's not just because the Anglo-American Scheuer, 32, possesses an apparent sweetness that makes his sungthrough embrace of anger, rage, and grief - all in the service, it should be added, of forgiveness and acceptance - that much more surprising.

“Another Op'nin', Another Show”. The first musical number of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate sets the scene for a group of actors and hoofers to brush up their Shakespeare, cross their fingers and hold on to their hearts, and to hope that not too much goes wrong with their show in late 1940s Baltimore. This BBC Proms performance was anything but that kind of on-the hoof creation: it was meticulously planned, ambitiously resourced, staged and choreographed, with costume changes a-plenty.

My (very) small haul of autographs collected as a schoolboy ran the gamut from Peter Pears to Linda McCartney but even back then I knew the classiest signature I bagged was that of Elaine Stritch. Years later, she was described as someone who went from being a sensation to a legend without ever being a star, but “starring” is the only word to describe her performance in the title role of the shortlived London premiere of a less than good Neil Simon play The Gingerbread Lady in 1974.

Since 1982 it’s been open season on the great and the good of Broadway musicals. It was in that very year that a chap called Gerard Alessandrini created Forbidden Broadway and from the hitherto innocuous sidelines of the fringe set out to cut any and everything with ideas above its station down to size. No show, no star was off limits. It was all good clean fun (sort of) but a sense of humour among those targeted was certainly recommended. They tried in vain not to recognise themselves but eventually learned to smile through the pain.

Women everywhere may start cutting loose in their kitchens after seeing Goddess, a sweet if slight Australian film that suggests a hybrid of Mamma Mia! and Shirley Valentine. Adapted (and greatly expanded) from a solo play written and performed by co-screenwriter Joanna Weinberg, the film's terrain is sure to hit many distaff moviegoers where they live, whether or not they find themselves displaced to Tasmania with a former boyband star (in this case, Ronan Keating) as their often-absent husband.

How do you solve a problem like a musical? Rodgers and Hammerstein's ambitious Carousel seems tailor-made for expansive venues like the National Theatre, where Nicholas Hytner memorably revived this show in 1992: diminutive spaces need not apply. But conventional wisdom gets a robust refutation from Morphic Graffiti's reimagining of the 1943 classic at east London's intimate Arcola, proving that, with creative thinking, small venues can pack a mighty punch. 

Given that Jersey Boys is about a singer, Frankie Valli, whose voice - or so we are told within the first five minutes - constitutes "a gift from god", it's a shame Clint Eastwood's film of the stage musical smash hit doesn't feel more heaven-sent. There are thrills to be had across the two hour-plus running time and enough Italian-Americanisms to make audiences feel as if they may have wandered into Goodfellas-lite.

The heat is on in Saigon, and 25 years after its world premiere, Cameron Mackintosh has just turned up the thermostat. Boublil and Schönberg's celebrated take on Puccini's Madam Butterfly has always been my favourite of their collaborations (though I retain an enthusiasm for the pre-revised score of Martin Guerre) and there are moments in Miss Saigon where, truth be told, they trump the Italian master of romantic melodrama at his own game.

On the Richter scale of catchiness Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’s songs for The Pajama Game are right up there. Quite who did what in their brief but shining songwriting partnership was never entirely clear, though Adler claimed supremacy in the music department. But one thing is clear: the man who brought them on and pushed them forward - the great Frank Loesser - is all over their work like a rash. It is said he wrote two of the Pajama Game songs uncredited but he could easily have written at least one other.

The Kinks’ music deserves more than another jukebox musical. Joe Penhall has instead collaborated with Ray Davies on a show about the pain and compromise musicians go through to fill those jukeboxes. Most of The Kinks’ biggest hits are here somewhere. But, in the Hampstead Theatre’s first musical, they’re used in a way reminiscent of the site of two previous Davies productions, Theatre Royal Stratford East. The songs joyously reach out to the audience, even as they are shown to be rooted in a wider, difficult and daft world of class, family, professional struggle and private agony.