It was Oscars night-lite for the premiere of Midnight Tango, starring Strictly Come Dancing’s Flavia Cacace and Vincent Simone. Film crews and photographers were in excitable search of Strictlerati – James Jordan, Mark Ramprakash, Lulu, and the co-producer of this show, Arlene Phillips – while bouncer types manned the doors and waited to genuflect before Louie Spence.
Time was, the star act was top of the bill. These days, he or she is the compere – a format with anticlimax built in. You're probably coming to Frank Skinner and Friends because you like Frank Skinner. But what you get is Skinner on a low wattage, pootling through some amusing links, plus sets by four standup or variety acts.
For three stormy years in his early life, Eugene O’Neill was all at sea. On October 16 1909, the man who would one day be hailed as the founding father of modern American drama spent his 21st birthday sailing the Pacific along the coasts of California, Mexico and Central America.
Poor old Max Hastings. There was the writer and former Daily Telegraph editor last week, dragged up to London from his Berkshire idyll to see One Man, Two Guvnors – the National theatre's widely lauded comedy, now transferred to the West End following sell-out performances at the Lyttleton and a UK tour – with his wife Penny, only to face the unexpected humiliation of being ridiculed on stage in front of a packed-out Adelphi theatre.
Love Never Dies – and, despite Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical closing abruptly in the West End after only a year, it looks set to be reborn when a film of the Australian production is released in March.
Where does art start? People were at it on pots long before they carried pigments into their caves at Lascaux. Migrations, a startlingly original show at Tate Britain, will open up all sorts of new ways of seeing art as migration, as a continual flowing in from somewhere else. Its migrant nature begins when you translate what you've seen into what you make.
Every Christmas Eve, the actor Eddie Redmayne cooks a ham. He tends to this ham with the utmost care and devotion, adding a little brown sugar here; a few more cloves there. It takes him hours, if not a whole day.
The spectre of the most scandalous and depressing episode in recent literary history raised its head this week. Salman Rushdie once again had his safety and his life threatened over his book The Satanic Verses, and was unable to show his face.
Five years after it was launched by the indefatigable Paul Lester, the Guardian's Band of the Day column has gained a live incarnation. Reflecting the feature's broad musical sweep, this packed showcase for emergent talent was wildly eclectic. The US/UK duo Big Deal impressed. Clutching guitars, Kacey Underwood and Alice Costelloe scratched out skeletal Velvet Underground-indebted songs cocooned in a fuzzy haze of FX. It looked likely, however, that 18-year-old Costelloe's aloof, Nico-like cool was due to being paralysed by nerves.
Back in the bad old days Spain's musical exports amounted to pure muscle memory from the nightclubs of the Costa del Sol and their ilk, as holidaymakers rushed home to propel the likes of Baccara or Los Del Rio to the top of the charts.
