Starring: Judy Garland, Margaret O'Brien

Starring: Judy Garland, Margaret O'Brien

Playwright Ella Hickson has been quietly making a name for herself, and this, her second play, smartly directed by James Dacre in the smaller of the Trafalgar studios, is a good indicator of her talent.

Psychologists say collectors of showbiz items hope some of the glamour rubs off on them

The special effects will blow you away, but the early highs make the rest of Lloyd Webber's megamusical feel more woozy than whizzy

Dorothy delivers but a four-legged star steals Lloyd Webber's show

When 'The Wizard of Oz' opens at the London Palladium tomorrow, one man will be casting the spotlight, as he's done for a galaxy of stars over 47 years. Andrew Johnson meets Linford Hudson

Watching End of the Rainbow, it's hard to believe that Judy Garland is dead, so closely does Tracie Bennett resemble her, bodily and in spirit. In Peter Quilter's play – a depiction of the one-time Dorothy's final fight for the limelight in the months before her death from an accidental drug overdose – Bennett nimbly rasps and cackles, seeming to speak and sing with the late actress's voice. Her triumphant performance shows Garland wrestling with a medley of addictions – to barbiturates, Benzedrine, Ritalin and other "adult candy" as well as to alcohol, men and applause. Her characterisation is at once alluring, in its dizzy abandon, and terrifying, as you watch a fragile person heading for the brink.

Rufus Wainwright is the Jekyll and Hyde of the modern-day music scene – on one hand bursting with pleasantries, effusive and adorable in the extreme, on the other, dour, introspective, angry and indulgent.

Nature, nurture or god-given gift, there is something spookily strange about Nikki Yanofsky.

Eat, Pray, Love, the movie of Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling confessional memoir, opened in the US this week.

One of the last surviving Munchkins from the enduring fantasy film The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meinhardt Raabe has a place in film history as the flamboyant coroner who gives official notice that the Wicked Witch of the East is dead, killed by the farmhouse that landed on her in a tornado that has also brought young Dorothy from Kansas to Munchkinland.

This enjoyable biography of Vincente Minnelli, described in lukewarm terms by Tony Curtis as "one of the better directors I worked with", traces his trajectory from window dresser to enigmatic MGM stalwart. Leslie Caron said that his "only intelligible bit of direction" during An American in Paris was, "Just be yourself."