Standing inside the Gemeentemuseum’s life-size reconstruction of Mondrian’s Paris studio, the painter’s reputation as an austere recluse seems well-deserved.

The CBSO is justifiably proud of its association with Benjamin Britten. There’s rather less proof that he reciprocated, dismissing the orchestra as "second-rate" after it premiered his War Requiem in 1962.

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.

It may be a cliché to say that this is a “timely” exhibition, but America After the Fall invites irresistible parallels with Trump’s America of today.

There’s rich irony in the timelining of 1940s Chinese blockbuster The Spring River Flows East.

Wagner’s Tristan left a huge mark on fin de siècle art, on the symbolist poets, even on their pseudonyms; Debussy himself toyed with a four-act opera on the subject.

The writing of Tennessee Williams, said his contemporary Arthur Miller, planted “the flag of beauty on the shores of commercial theatre”.

In 1942, Roy Acuff set up Acuff-Rose Music in partnership with Nashville-based songwriter and talent scout Fred Rose. The new publishing company was dedicated to treating songwriters decently. They would not be cheated out of their copyrights. There would be clear and honest accounting. The contracts offered would have better percentages than rival publishers. There would be no shady deals. Acuff-Rose cocked a snook at the country music establishment and, in time, had writers as important as The Everly Brothers, Lefty Frizzell, Don Gibson and Roy Orbison on its books.

The end of empire has rarely looked more cinematically beguiling than in Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, the visually lavish 1992 drama written for Catherine Deneuve, who gets the film’s epigraphic line about “believing that the world is made of things that are inseparable: men and women, the mountains and the plains, human beings and gods, Indochina and France…” Substitute Communism for “gods” in this somewhat faux-glamourised depiction of an independe

Has there ever been a more pertinent time to revive the poetic mythologies of Brecht and Weill? The writer said that the good-life-for-dollars city of Mahagonny was not exclusively an American state of mind and should be set in any country where it's performed. But the inverted morality tale of The Seven Deadly Sins explicitly references seven American cities. And with lines like (in the Auden/Kallman translation) "If you show your offence at injustice, Mr Big will show he's offended", it's very much of the moment.