SAFE PASSAGE Robert Allan Ackerman (15) THE MAN IN MY LIFE Jean Charles Tacchella (12) SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT Ingmar Bergman (PG)

1995 Edinburgh Festival MUSIC I WAS LOOKING AT THE CEILING: Royal Lyceum THE JACOBIN: Festival Theatre RUSLAN AND LYUDMILA: Usher Hall

The Oxford Book of Humorous Quotations ed. Ned Sherrin Oxford £15.99

Those of us who remember the film do so in detail, frame by grainy black-and-white frame. There's Hayley Mills and that scene-stealing little lad, Alan Barnes, as her brother Charles. And there's Alan Bates, the stranger in the barn, the murderer on the run, the man they think is Jesus. But what really touches us in Mary Hayley Bell's enchanting story is the innocence of childhood, the wonder of discovery, the capacity for giving, loving, and believing, for keeping faith; and the growing pains th at go with it. What could possibly be added to Whistle Down the Wind that might touch us still more? Music?

This year is the 90th anniversary of her birth and the 20th anniversary of her death, but where are the Dorothy Fields celebrations? Her career as theatrical bookwriter and lyricist spans 45 years of Broadway history. Anything the Gershwins were anywhere near is being dragged from trunks and libraries to be re- recorded, yet despite longevity, hits and awards, Fields remains virtually unknown.

I WISH IT SO: Show songs by Bernstein, Blitzstein, Sondheim and Weill

JULE STYNE, who has died at 88, had a new show on Broadway only last year. The show, The Red Shoes, was a disaster but to have got it on at all at his age is an achievement, unequalled by any other composer. In that sense it was a fitting finale. Styne, only four years younger than Richard Rodgers, got to Broadway 20 years later; but made up for lost time by writing music for 22 staged shows. Before that he had written songs for countless movies, but even in Hollywood he had been a late starter, coming to the job after working as a pianist, bandleader and vocal coach.

BIOGRAPHIES are generally regarded these days as sexual exposes, and so most of the excitement surrounding Michael Shelden's life of Graham Greene has centred on revelations of the writer as adulterer and homosexual. But the boldest claim in the book, it seems to me, is the biographer's contention that Greene produced no novels of real merit after the 1961 publication of A Burnt-Out Case, its title presented as emblematic and confessional. As Greene kept publishing fiction until 1988, it is effectively suggested that the last three decades of his writing life were a waste of time.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM has frequently been criticised for not writing songs that say 'I love you' straight out. This seems to me more of a virtue than a vice, especially when you consider the recent musicals that have fallen over themselves to say it, usually in the most bloated, generalised and pseudo-poetic terms. In treating the subject urbanely, circuitously, or obliquely, Sondheim has been following an older and nobler Broadway tradition.

So this person wrote musicals, right?' asked the woman on the airport bus, staring in bafflement at the 17 Stephen Sondheim Society badges on our 17 lapels. Patiently, we informed her that Sondheim was still alive and it was the premiere of his latest show, Passion, at the Plymouth Theatre on Broadway, we - the newly formed band of aficionados - had come to New York to see.

It's a rainy Saturday afternoon, and here's your choice: Bob Wilson's Football Focus, a fish documentary or BBC2's 1930s black-and-white matinee - Die Laughing with Eddie Cantor and Lena Marsh. Which will you go for? You'll opt for the movie, of course. It's comfort viewing, what BBC2 Controller Michael Jackson calls 'the warm bath of nostalgia'. That's why you'll start watching. But why will you keep watching?

CORRECTION (PUBLISHED 8 APRIL 1994) APPENDED TO THIS ARTICLE

IF Jonathan Miller's semi-staging of the St Matthew Passion at Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street, counted as opera, it would go to the top of my list, because nothing else has matched the intensity Miller achieved from this understated presentation - done in the round with a tight focus on the action and an electrifying closeness between singers, instruments and audience. But it doesn't count; and neither does Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd at the National Theatre or Steve Reich's The Cave at the Festival Hall, two brutally impactful pieces, memorably staged.

Wayne's World 2 has gone straight into the number one slot in America . . . 'You can't point out to a politician the sheer value of a theatre working in the community. It does half-a-million quids' worth of community work every week' - Alan Ayckbourn . . . All change at London's Prince of Wales Theatre: from the sublime City of Angels to the return of Lloyd Webber's Aspects of Love for 30 performances . . . Rumour has it that Barry Manilow's West End musical Copacabana may be postponed - we want to know why . . . Carol Burnett to play the Julie Andrews role in the Sondheim compilation Putting It Together in the West End . . . 'I sometimes am over-theatrical' - Oliver Reed . . . Rock'n'roll suicide: Meat Loaf says a woman fan was on the verge of blowing her brains out when his single 'Heaven Can Wait' (geddit?) came on the radio and saved the day . . .