Emma Brockes

Lewis has a beautiful voice, but when she performed Memory, she was not Grizabella the mangy old cat, but Leona Lewis, pop star and seller of 20m records, just as, a few years ago, when Catherine Zeta Jones played Desiree in A Little Night Music (also directed by Nunn) she busted out of role to sing Send in the Clowns with the zip of the Incredible Hulk busting out of his shirt. Perhaps this doesn't matter. A song sung on these terms can still be highly enjoyable, although in this case I found the performance of Memory rather stressful, particularly the crescendo at the end and the bits when Lewis listed dangerously to one side while doing some Acting. It was a relief when the story moved on.

The 1998 production was staged in the same venue, Studio 54, and starred Jennifer Jason Leigh as Sally Bowles, which she played with spiky, unpredictable abandon. Michelle Williams is a very different kind of actor, in this instance gauche, touching, unsure of herself in a way that seems as true to the idea of Sally Bowles as more robust approaches...As was the case the first time round, the show is Alan Cumming's and his MC has to be one of the great stage performances of all time. It's so rare to get a second shot at seeing something this good, you should do anything you can to get a ticket. Where Joel Grey, in the movie version, was impish and sinister, Cumming is brutish, jack-booted, playing the part with a yobbish licentiousness that highlights just how close the satirist and the satirised come to looking to each other in the end. It's a hard thing to be saucy and menacing at the same time, but Cumming pulls it off.

The RSC's Matilda opened on Broadway this week, and it was so good, people in the theatre wiped their eyes and mouthed to each other: 'Oh my God, this is so good.' It was so good, the unfamiliar score sounded like something you'd been singing since your middle-school production.