It has been a veritable merry-go-round in the world of musical theatre this week, with news that former West End Phantoms Earl Carpenter and John Owen-Jones will play the masked anti-hero when the Andrew Lloyd Webber show tours the UK next year. Meanwhile, another former Phantom – Ramin Karimloo – is soon to man the barricades in Les Misérables in the West End. Want more? Oliver! goes on tour with Samantha Barks (who you might have seen recently in Les Mis) playing Nancy. Oh, and Darius Danesh, now known as Darius Campbell, will be returning to Chicago when it moves across London to the Garrick Photograph: Ken McKay/Rex
Despite having sadly submitted to the longest of all pauses back in 2008, Harold Pinter has also featured prominently this week, with the launch of both a play and a theatre bearing his name. The British Library has unearthed a lost one-act sketch called Umbrellas that the 29-year-old playwright wrote for a revue at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1960. Meanwhile, the West End’s Comedy Theatre was renamed in the Nobel Prize winner’s honour, in time for the opening of Death and the Maiden, by Ariel Dorfman and starring Thandie Newton, a play that was dedicated to Pinter Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
Sadler’s Wells has announced a season of shows celebrating UK dance’s most popular (and populist) choreographer, Matthew Bourne, who has clocked up 25 years with his company New Adventures. It will culminate in Christmas 2012 with Bourne’s new version of Sleeping Beauty, with the action shifted into the 21st century. But Bourne’s is not the only big dance residency announced this week: English National Ballet will be taking its tutus to the Tate to celebrate a new Picasso exhibition next February Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
Over in Russia, the long-awaited reopening of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre after six years and £435m (or a staggering 21bn roubles) of funding. The redevelopment returns the 2,200-seat to its pre-Soviet position as one of the world’s top opera houses. Still, the work hasn’t pleased everyone, with Nikolai Tsiskaridze, a former principal dancer at the theatre, declaring "you have the feeling that you are in a hotel in Turkey that has been built in the shape of the Bolshoi Theatre" Photograph: Kirill Kuddyavtsev/AFP/Getty
Parking charges for West End theatregoers are already on the steep side, and Westminster council plans to extend the rates to evenings and weekends. Some good news this week came with the announcement that the new higher rates and longer hours have been postponed until January. Still, theatre owners fear the new charges could cost millions of pounds in lost ticket sales. On the plus side, though, the West End appears to be doing all right for the moment, with new results showing that London theatre looks set to rake in more than £500m at the box office for the third year in a row Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
The Royal Shakespeare Company hasn’t had a permanent home in London since it abandoned the Barbican, where it had been based for 20 years, back in 2002. Outgoing artistic director Michael Boyd has hinted recently that he hopes to have embryonic plans in place for an RSC venue in the capital before he leaves at the end of next year. Meanwhile, back at the RSC's Stratford-upon-Avon HQ, Boyd has been forced to defend the company's latest production – Marat/Sade – after audiences turned their noses up at some of its more graphic scenes Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
But should it be called the Royal Shakespeare Company at all? Anonymous, a new film by Roland Emmerich opening this week, posits that the famous plays were in fact written by the Earl of Oxford. The thesis has support from some notable figures – Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi among them – but Shakespeare scholars have been distinctly unimpressed, publishing a polemic rebutting the film’s claims. Meanwhile, in one of those wonderful coincidences of which Shakespeare is so fond, it was announced that another fictional take on Shakespeare’s life – Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love – is to be adapted for the the stage Photograph: Image.net
