The week opened with the welcome news that Phantom of the Opera composer Andrew Lloyd Webber had dusted off his cheque book to inject £32m into arts organisations across the UK. The money – given out by his charitable foundation – came from proceeds from the sale of Picasso's Portrait of Angel Fernández de Soto. The artwork is from Picasso’s blue period, but the money, which went to organisations such as inclusive theatre Chickenshed, has left the recipients feeling quite the opposite
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Lloyd Webber may well be getting a knock on his door from fundraisers at Wilton’s Music Hall, after the historic venue in east London was unsuccessful in its bid for £2.25m from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The money was intended to support a project to stabilise the fabric of the building and mend a leaking roof, but the future of the 1858 music hall, the last of its kind and (legend has it) home to London’s first ever can-can, has now been thrown into doubt
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Not having a roof doesn’t appear to have hindered Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, though. Having won awards for its last two seasons, the theatre reopened for the summer this week with an adaptation of William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies. In a scene reminiscent of TV series Lost, the production’s set is built around a crash-landed plane. The show itself has had a less turbulent time of it with critics Photograph: Tristram Kenton
In Australia, news has arrived that Baz Luhrmann’s hit 1992 movie Strictly Ballroom is to be turned into a stage musical. Obvious really, especially bearing in mind that the story started off as a stage play before making it to the big screen. The show will open at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre in 2013, before – one would assume – foxtrotting its way to New York and London. Let’s just hope Ann Widdecombe doesn’t wangle herself a cameo
Photograph: ITV / Rex Features
Political satirist Rory Bremner is turning his poison pen on some of Widdecombe’s former parliamentary colleagues, in a new translation of Jacques Offenbach’s comic opera Orpheus in the Underworld. Bremner’s updating of the story, which he is writing for Scottish Opera, will open at Glasgow Citizens in September and will see him taking a swipe at the coalition government, MPs' expenses and the Bullingdon Club – the exclusive Oxford drinking society that boasts Boris Johnson and David Cameron among its alumni
Photograph: Andy Paradise / Rex Features
James Corden, meanwhile, has returned to his alma mater, the National Theatre, where he first shot to prominence in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys in 2004. Critics haven’t always been kind to him since, but this week they were unstinting in their praise of the Gavin and Stacey star, who is appearing in One Man, Two Guvnors – Richard Bean’s updating of Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters. Even the Sun, not exactly a regular in the Lyttleton stalls, chipped in with a five-star review and the show is being tipped as the comic hit of the year
Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Casting coup of the week, though, has to go to Sheffield Theatres, which has managed to reunite Dominic West and Clarke Peters – AKA Baltimore detectives McNulty and Freamon from cult US TV series The Wire – to play Iago and Othello in a new staging of Shakespeare’s tragedy at the Sheffield Crucible. The play will run from October as part of a season marking the 40th anniversary of the Yorkshire venue and will also feature the Crucible’s founding artistic director, Colin George, in the cast Photograph: Guardian
