Nothing anybody over the age of 30 says about the new Mean Girls musical, spawn of Tina Fey’s witty script for the 2004 screen sideswipe of that name, will make any difference. As with all things Barbie, the pink madness seems deathless. 

There are many women whose outstanding science was attributed to men or simply devalued to the point of obscurity, but recent interest in the likes of DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin and NASA’s Katherine Johnson has given credit where credit is due. 

Catchy even when the lyrics are at their cheesiest, the Jerry Herman Songbook serves up a string of memorable tunes: you’ll probably find that, like me, you recognize about 80 per cent of the material in Jerry’s Girls. But is it enough when you (read I) have fallen in love with productions of Dear World and La Cage aux Folles but haven’t yet seen Hello, Dolly! or Mame on stage? The appetite still needs gratifying.

From New York’s Public Theater, the venue that nurtured Hamilton, comes another estimable pocket musical, Passing Strange. It was first staged in 2008, to Tony-nominated acclaim, and it shows. Its forthright cheek and irreverence are refreshing and welcome.

Small-scale shows, nurtured in offbeat places, are becoming all the rage in the West End. Red Pitch, Operation Mincemeat, For Black Boys… have already made their mark, and now this quirky musical for just two performers joins them.

Is there a more purely likeable actress than Sheridan Smith, the performer who was still a teenager when she stole the show at the Donmar in Into the Woods and who managed, as Elle Woods in the West End premiere of Legally Blonde, to bring tears both to her eyes and ours?

In a secret chamber somewhere, the producers of MJ the Musical may be keeping a portrait of the King of Pop that has acquired all his scars, physical and psychological.

Can there be anyone from Sheffield who has not seen Standing at the Sky’s Edge, possibly several times?

Transgression was so deliciously enticing. Back in the Eighties when I saw Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the West End on three occasions, life was simpler – or so us straight white men flattered ourselves to believe.

Hot on the heels of Brigid Larmour’s updating of The Merchant of Venice to the East End in 1936, a spirited new musical across town at Southwark Playhouse is tackling the same topic: the impact of rising British fascism in the same era, culminating in the clash between locals with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) on the streets of Bethnal Green.