It’s not often that a venue’s stage door is easier to find than its main entrance, but The Old Vic Tunnels is one such location. For those behind Coming Up Later, however, this is all part of the fun of a three-evening underground festival featuring a rather wonderfully haphazard range of performances. The event is the product of The Old Vic’s outreach programme, Old Vic New Voices, and the funding and artistic crowd-sourcing network IdeasTap.com. Such collaboration resulted in an opportunity few emergent creative directors could ignore: a production team, a budget to play with and three expansive tunnels for those who could imagine how best to use them.

Broadway may not be “just for gays any more”, as the event's unstoppably charming and funny compere Neil Patrick Harris noted in his song-and-dance opening to the 2011 Tony Awards, held last night in New York to honour that city's theatre season just gone. But it’s still very much about the Brits: some habits never die.

The inaugural year of National Theatre Wales included an immensely ambitious body of work which tested to the limit the definition of what a national theatre can and should be. In new venues and old, found spaces and open spaces, it staged several freshly created plays, some retrieved ones, as well as adaptations, devised pieces and, in Aeschylus'sThe Persians, the oldest play of all. The year was capped at Easter by the widely hailed The Passion of Port Talbot starring Michael Sheen. Now NTW has announced its second season and it looks to be just as boundary-pushing as the first.

That’s the question New York theatre folk are asking this morning, following the announcement of the 2011 Tony nominations, honouring the best of the Broadway theatre season just gone. Radcliffe was thought to be a dead cert for a nomination for his performance as the careerist window washer in the smash-hit revival of Frank Loesser’s How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. And there were many who thought Radcliffe would go on to win the trophy on 12  June, just as another visiting British film star, Catherine Zeta-Jones, did for her Broadway musical theatre debut in A Little Night Music last year.

A sliderule of 11-15 per cent reductions in annual grants by 2015, compared with this year, has been applied to Britain's major orchestras, opera, dance, theatre and music organisations. One major gainer is London's Barbican Centre - one major loser is the now world-famous Almeida Theatre, which loses almost 40 per cent of its current annual subsidy despite its reputation for innovation and discovery. However, the Arcola Theatre, another small innovative theatre, gets a big boost. Companies to lose all their grant from next year include Hammersmith's Riverside Studios and Derby Theatre.

The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Love Never Dies emerged empty-handed at the 35th Laurence Olivier Awards, despite seven nominations, but it was a good night for Legally Blonde, Stephen Sondheim, and, so it seemed, pretty well any production lucky enough to play the National's Lyttelton auditorium. And for American playwriting, too, with Clybourne Park following last year's The Mountaintop as a States-side effort that was named Best Play Sunday night at London's equivalent of the Tony Awards.

But not for long. The first ever National Theatre Live worldwide screening of a Donmar production came to a halt between great Jacobi's mad musings on archery and toasted cheese; later, pedalling back from Notting Hill against a furious wind, I guessed the reason for the blip. The weather had scuppered Lear's fate, off stage as well as on.