It's the Mousetrap of musicals, the wholly unstoppable show and, to mark its 25th anniversary this year (the 30th, if you date it back to the initial French concept album and Paris production), it will be staged in London at three different venues. You can even see them all in a single, mighty weekend bender, if the mood takes you: the original Les Misérables at the Queen's Theatre, a celebratory all-star concert at the O2 Arena on 3 October and an invigorating new production which plays at the Barbican after a national tour until 2 October.

A vital theatrical partnership gets renewed, and then some, in Jamie Lloyd's revival of Passion, a transforming production that not only marks the start of various Donmar-related tributes to Stephen Sondheim in his 80th birthday year but also reminds us that this theatre reopened its doors in 1992 with the UK premiere of Assassins, since which time it has staged five further Sondheim shows; Passion, to speak as openly as this musical's heroine does of the

It takes a brave company to revive a notorious Broadway flop. It takes an even braver one to supplement a small cast with an amateur, community chorus of over 60 people, onstage for almost the entire duration. The Young Vic can rarely be accused of lacking ambition, and their latest production – sprawling American musical The Human Comedy by Hair’s Galt MacDermot – is as ambitious as it gets. Reinventing a flawed fantasy-parable about community as genuine community theatre, they have tapped into a sincerity that no amount of slick Broadway effects could hope to match – a sincerity that, if it cannot quite redeem the play’s faults, sure as hell comes close.

Every time I go to Sadler’s Wells now I come out wondering if there’s something wrong with my hearing, so loud and numbing are their speakers. It’s a blight on a lot of shows, but on none more so than Shoes, because this is the first major London production written by that celebrated musical witsmith Mr Richard Thomas since his Jerry Springer, The Opera, and last night I missed probably half the words that I’m guessing should be the chief merit.

Richard Thomas wrote Jerry Springer, The Opera, as everyone knows - and he is soon to unveil Anna Nicole, the opera. Can this be the same Richard Thomas who’s written a dance show at Sadler’s Wells, with a cheesy poster, called Shoes? It hardly seems likely. Flames, expletives, scabrous lines, suppurating satire - that’s what makes a Richard Thomas show, not (surely) tap-dancing in platforms and ballet-dancing in flip-flops?

I suspect that more than half the audience that goes to see Dirty Dancing on stage has seen the 1987 movie, and that quite a few of them have seen the stage version more than once. There’s a strange feeling of being at a party where everyone knows everyone, and the party’s held nightly at the same house. It surely is not the misleading title that accounts for the wildly enthusiastic flow of fans - there’s nothing dirty about this squeaky-clean story, and there’s not that much dancing either. No, it must be that eternal celluloid magic, the girlish fantasy of entering a favourite movie and touching Patrick Swayze’s ghost.

Bo Burnham says he doesn’t like the terms musical comic, internet sensation or teenage wonder. Well he’s all three, save the last now, as he turned 20 during this year’s Fringe - and anyway he prefers the term prodigy, he tells us in deadpan tones typical of the deeply ironic, faux offensive manner of his performance style. But sensationally talented he undoubtedly is, and this is an hour so stuffed with gags - verbal, visual and musical - that one almost doesn’t have enough time to savour each one before yet another rolls by.

Wicked is that rare Broadway musical transplant to London that has recouped its costs - and how. Part paean to female empowerment, part parable of life in Bush-era America or any land on the desperate look-out for an enemy, the show also offers spectacle a-plenty amidst a musical theatre climate increasingly defined by the Menier Chocolate Factory and its various progeny, whereby less is more (which, in fact, sometimes it is).

So it might not have had quite the star power of the Proms’ Sondheim concert, or the edgy cool factor of the likes of Sweeney Todd or Assassins, but A Celebration of Rodgers and Hammerstein, with its classic numbers from Oklahoma, The King and I and The Sound of Music, proved that this unfashionable, pre-ironic musical duo still know how to put on a show. A packed Royal Albert Hall crowd were all but dancing in the aisles (though perhaps hip-replacements may have accounted for this restraint) after a couple of hours in the company of so many old musical friends.