Billy Elliot is the best thing to happen to Broadway for a long while. The hit West End show about a working-class boy in a doomed North of England coal mining town who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer pulls off a remarkable trick: It’s the first musical I’ve seen to successfully combine a huge dollop of sentiment ...

Opera's most famous double bill remains yoked together for no particular reason except habit, and the fact that these two revenge tragedies were first performed within a couple of years of each other. Richard Jones's new production for English National Opera emphasises the disparities. He treats Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana relatively conventionally, retaining the Sicilian setting but shifting ...