Michael Grandage’s departure from the Donmar is marked by Shakespeare’s tale of an ambitious new arrival on the throne

As a hit revival of 'South Pacific' arrives in London from Broadway, Michael Coveney separates the classics from the rest

Two brothers make their way from digging for pay dirt in Alaska to hobnobbing with the super-rich, in all-American style

In Assassins, Stephen Sondheim put an ironic spin on traditional American musical forms ("Hail to the Chief", the cakewalk) to suggest that the crazies who take pot-shots at Presidents are the product of a philosophy that proclaims, "In the USA/ You can work your way/ To the head of the line". In Road Show the composer similarly deploys the razzmattazz of vaudeville to highlight how, at the heart of the Land of Opportunity, lurks a venal, get-rich-quick opportunism.

Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, now back in the West End, reverses chronology to dazzling effect. Others have played with time and failed, says Paul Taylor, but those who get it right often achieve works of incredible depth

The songwriter Stephen Sondheim is to be honoured at this year's Laurence Olivier Awards.

Robbie Williams offers a glimpse inside his head, while Jay-Z pretends to have been to Morocco

The Week in Arts

The title of Laurence Mark Wythe's musical (first seen at the New End in Hampstead in 2006) will serve as a wish for new musical theatre in Britain. According to Stephen Sondheim's lyric in West Side Story. "Something's coming, something good, if I can wait."

There are ghosts and survivor's guilt in the second act of Les Misérables that sound like a trailer for the upcoming stage adaptation of Birdsong; Victor Hugo's Marius (played by pop idol Gareth Gates) comes through the carnage on the Paris barricades and sings of empty chairs and tables in the ABC café while his friends materialise in a celestial, supportive chorus.

Sondheim uncovers the pitfalls of youth and beauty, while Gambon shows age has its perks

Passion is the show that divides even Sondheim devotees. There are die-hard admirers who find the score – which instead of songs offers a nagging network of motifs and internal echoes – in singularly short supply of the eponymous commodity. Its gothic story has been dismissed as simultaneously distasteful and incredible. But Jamie Lloyd's Donmar revival of this rebarbative 1994 musical makes a compelling case for its power to unsettle and affront.

Once upon a time there was a wicked old wit ...

Into the Woods goes virtually site-specific with this sharp, spirited revival of Sondheim's 1987 musical. Offering a Freudian take on fairy tales as psychological rites-of-passage, the piece is inventively directed by Timothy Sheader and Liam Steel in the sylvan setting of Regent Park's Open Air Theatre.