DO I HEAR A WALTZ? LANDOR THEATRE

ROSE NT COTTESLOE LONDON

RICKY JAY AND HIS 52 ASSISTANTS THE OLD VIC LONDON

CANDIDE OLIVIER NATIONAL THEATRE LONDON

Tomorrow night, exactly 25 years after pop met its Waterloo at the Eurovision Song Contest, Abba's greatest hits musical Mamma Mia opens in London. Is it just a question of money, money, money?

Poulenc Centenary Wigmore Hall, W1 Park Lane Group Young Artists Purcell Room, SE1 Into the Woods Donmar, WC1

The Japanese have an habit of citing individuals as living national treasures. If we did that too, my first list of candidates would include Sheila Hancock (right). She has cavorted and cajoled her way through everything from sitcoms to Sondheim via a terrifying performance in A Judgement in Stone, so it's no surprise to discover that she's now making her Almeida debut in what promises to be a riotous production of Gorky's Vassa directed by Howard Davies. Davies is busying filling his mantelpiece with awards for The Iceman Cometh.

For those whose hearts sink at the prospect of the lean dramatic fare on offer this pantotide, the RSC's winter season in London is a godsend, although the acclaimed trilogy of one-act Irish plays presented under the banner Shadows is hardly cheering stuff. John Crowley - who has also directed the psychocandy Sondheim musical Into the Woods at the Donmar - has rustled up an evening themed around the subject of bereavement and informed by the harsher rhythms of rural life. There are two by Synge from 1904. In the Shadow of the Glen, the wry tale of an old farmer who tests the fidelity of his young wife by feigning death, will do something to reinstate laughter lines eradicated by the harrowing Riders to the Sea, in which two Aran Island women lament as the last of their menfolk is claimed by the deep. The evening ends with Yeats's poetic nightmare Purgatory, about a family caught in a cycle of bloodshed. Unmissable stuff.

Michael White on divas, diaries and disasters

INTO THE WOODS DONMAR WAREHOUSE

SETTLING THE Score last Sunday afternoon on Radio 3 surveyed the bewildering world of 20th-century harmony. Harmony, Stephen Sondheim said, is what gives a composer particular character - and went on to challenge that assertion by confessing he took some of his chords from Ravel. The result didn't remind me of Ravel.

THE PLAYWRIGHT, novelist and screenwriter James Goldman won the Academy Award for the screen adaptation of his own play The Lion in Winter, his dialogue described by one critic as "witty, intelligent, pithy and often mercurial". His other screenplays included Robin and Marion, and his work for the stage included the book for the Stephen Sondheim musical Follies. Particularly happy with historical subjects, he wrote the screenplay for Nicholas and Alexandra, a novel about King John, and a play about Tolstoy.

The National Theatre is doing its millennial stocktake. What are the most significant plays? And what does significant mean anyway, asks David Benedict

EVERY WRITER seeks to produce, at the very least, a classic phrase. In Gypsy, his musical about the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, Stephen Sondheim did that and more. "One of the problems," he recalls, "was to come up with a phrase that means `things are going to be better than ever' that isn't flat and yet isn't so poetic". So saying, he coined "everything's coming up roses".