Wet blanket for Mackintosh

Artspeople

Sir Cameron Mackintosh opens the biggest blockbuster musical of the year next week when Martin Guerre premieres on Wednesday. The show, which has some of the most hi-tech computerised wizardry yet seen in a musical, hit problems this week. I was among the 1,600 people turned away from the preview on Tuesday which was cancelled owing to "a fault in the three-phase electrical distribution system". Though an alternative date was offered, I feel that these problems should be sorted out in rehearsals before preview tickets go on sale to the public, whose fares and babysitting costs are not refunded.

Roger Daltrey's "black eye", which saw him sporting a target eye patch at the Hyde Park concert last weekend, was much more than a black eye. When Gary Glitter caught Daltrey with a swinging microphone stand the night before the concert, Daltrey was unconscious for five minutes. He suffered bleeding in the eye and has a fractured eye socket. But I'm told that he did not suffer sense of humour failure. When his distraught wife rushed on to the stage and tried to rouse him, shouting "Who are you, who are you, tell me who you are," he replied: "Mick Jagger."

Susan Ferleger Brades has been appointed director of the Hayward Gallery in London. Ms Brades, an American, has been deputy director at the Gallery for three years.

One aspect of Genista McIntosh's appointment as chief executive of the Royal Opera House that appears to have gone unnoticed is that three of our four national companies will from next year be run by people who trained and achieved high office at the Royal Shakespeare Company. What influence will their common RSC heritage have on the running of the arts? Merely, of course, that they will all dress in black leather and continually be asking for more money.