In a fair few bars around the world tonight, bands will be playing “That’s The Way (I Like It)”, “Give It Up” and so many more of KC and the Sunshine Band’s bangers. They’ve filled dancefloors for half a century and Harry Wayne Casey (KC to you and me) has a claim to having written the first ever disco hit with George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby” – Benny and Bjorn’s inspiration for “Dancing Queen” no less!

I have two guilty secrets about the theatre – okay, two I’m prepared to own up to right here, right now. I quite enjoy some jukebox musicals and I often prefer schools-oriented, pared back, slightly simplified Shakespeare to the full-scale Folio versions. There – I’ve outed myself!

What a delight it is to see the director, the star, even the marketing manager these days FFS, get out of the way and let a really strong story stand on its own two feet. Like a late one at the Brixton Academy itself, this is a helluva night out.

War, pestilence, famine, death. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my fill of them all. So what better time to visit the genuinely sunny uplands – the long-anticipated second album from Wet Leg.

My, those seemingly demure, Amish-styled girls have grown (see the demonic cover, replete with scary talons and an unhinged-looking Rhian Teasdale). They’ve officially supplemented the line-up with the three very hairy boys who’ve been playing with them on live shows and everybody’s been involved in the writing. And everything’s turned out very well indeed.

In 2012, the award-winning American writer Sarah Ruhl met a Yale playwriting student who became a special part of her life. Out of their friendship she created Letters from Max, a 2018 book of their correspondence, then a play performed in New York in 2023.

As something of an immigrant to the capital myself in the long hot summer of 1984, I gobbled up Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes’s novel of an outsider embracing the temptations and dangers of London.

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. 

Cleveland is probably the American city most like the one in which I grew up. Early into the icy embrace of post-industrialisation, not really on the way to anywhere, but not a destination either and obsessed with popular music and sports, it's very Scouse. Okay, the Mersey did not catch fire as the Cuyahoga River did in 1969, but it would not have surprised anyone in Liverpool had it done so.

Mac is in prison for a long stretch. He is calm, contemplative almost, understands how to do his time and has only one rule – nobody, cellmate or guard, can touch the photo of his daughter, then three years old, attached to his wall. Though he is a man who gets through the days with few problems, he solves them through violence. On his release, his only wish is to find the daughter who will have forgotten him. 

There’s a moment in writer/co-director, Jonathan Brown’s, gritty new play, Knife on the Table, that justifies its run almost on its own. Flint, a decent kid going astray, is "invited" to prove he’s ready for the next step in his drug-dealing career by stabbing Bragg, another "soldier", who has become more trouble than he’s worth.