The infectious music of Abba reached a little bit further round the globe last night, as the first Mandarin-language version of Mamma Mia! opened in Shanghai, with producers hoping audiences will indeed thank them for the music and deliver them a blockbuster.

The tale of a pig in post-war austerity Britain has prompted the unexpected return to West End musicals of one of its all-time greats. Susie Mesure meets Cameron Mackintosh

Carl Davis conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra in his own accompaniment to the original silent film Phantom of the Opera this month. In February he conducted his scores to Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush and Modern Times – and this is only a taste of the empire he has created over the past 30 years.

A pleasure boat belonging to the theatre impresario Sir Cameron Mackintosh has been destroyed in a fire that police are treating as suspicious.

It is a confrontation as passionate as anything seen between Javert and Jean Valjean, pitting Cameron Mackintosh against the orchestra of Les Misérables, one of the theatre impresario's biggest successes.

Two new all-singing, all-dancing shows from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, both inspired by films, will be staged shortly. Michael Coveney believes they and other high-profile openings will benefit from a post-Glee hunger for musical theatre

The arrival of Les Misérables in the West End some 25 years ago was a good news/bad news deal for ticket touts. On the up side the demand for tickets was stratospheric; on the down side it wasn't the easiest title for an East End gouger to mutter out of the side of his mouth. In Les Mis at 25: Matt Lucas Dreams the Dream, Nicholas Allott, a senior executive for Cameron Mackintosh, recalled walking to the theatre one day and hearing a burly man pitching tickets for a show he could only pronounce as "Lesbian Rebels".

It’s 25 years since the world lost Rock Hudson to Aids. Hudson was a screen idol in 50s LA, but his career was perpetually under threat from Confidential Magazine.

As 'Les Miserables' celebrates its 25th anniversary, its producer Cameron Mackintosh talks to Arifa Akbar about frugality and the future of British theatre

It was as close as we get to being guests on the 20th Century Fox soundstages circa.1955. As the Main Title of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! glided effortlessly into “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” and the John Wilson Orchestra’s burnished trumpets poured on their sun-kissed vibrato the sound, the style, the feel of how this music in these arrangements should go was “right” – every sigh, every swoon, every refined inflection. It couldn’t have been “righter”.

Five Guys is one of the original "have a good time" jukebox shows in the West End, and the pleasure of seeing it again is like that of seeing an old friend: familiar, heart-warming, with faults you don't mind living with for a couple of hours.

A brilliant, high-speed satire on the commercial theatre takes no prisoners as it lampoons some West End staples

"Avenue Q" - a little show with humongous appeal - celebrated its transfer to the Gielgud Theatre last night with a pool party. None of its furry friends took to the water (Trekkie Monster has a well known aversion to it - it dampens his ardour) but the humans they brought along looked like they might have been tempted had their felted and furry alter egos given them a free hand, so to speak.