Is the new year a time to reflect on the misjudgments of a life spent opining? Thirty years ago, when the  Phantom of the Opera hit Melbourne like the heatwave that encircled it, some fraction of us were snooty about all that sung-through sub-Puccini melodic marvellousness. Was this how the musicals of Lerner and Loewe and Rodgers and Hammerstein had ended up? Well, Phantom has stood up remarkably well as musical drama, indeed as a form of contemporary opera, so that it’s good to have Opera Australia backing this musical at the Sydney State Theatre. ‘The Music of the Night’ is integral to our sense of what the form can do and who can ever forget ‘Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again’? It has a beautiful melody and it’s good to have the twenty-seven-piece Orchestra Victoria doing justice to these riches. On the other hand, the original production was directed by Hal Prince who is a genius of the theatre, and it had the younger Anthony Warlow, still in the prime of his operatic powers as the Phantom and Marina Prior (not Sarah Brightman but still) very formidable as Christine.

Before Christmas, the show was looking sleek and formidable from central row H stalls. The spectacularism of this new production however was just a bit formulaic. Josh Piterman was a dark agile Phantom, strong voiced and insinuatingly death-defying, but he wasn’t Anthony Warlow, there wasn’t that breathtaking quality when a big star brings down the chandelier (so to speak). The best thing about the current Phantom is its overall standard, which is very high, and although Blake Bowden’s Raoul is fine, the truly outstanding thing must be Amy Manford’s crystalline Christine.

Melbourne has been going through a virtual plague of musicals recently which may be a blessing given that it was desolated into near non-existence by the severity of Daniel Andrews’ closures. The account of all this in Lockdown by Nine’s senior reporter Chip Le Grand has a lean and sceptical brilliance which will hold you like a thriller: the housing commission flats left without food and immigrants frightened by masses of blundering police, the moment when Andrews won’t even look at Brett Sutton, his chief medical officer, because he gives away the depleted state of the health system. And in a magical interlude, all the Melburnians who went out at dawn – because there could be no Anzac Day service – and Le Grand, with his wife and kids, heard a concert trombonist render the stark plangency of the Last Post. This is the book they will go to decades hence to understand the lockdown.

In the meantime it’s been good to look at biographies and autobiographies. In a world of musicals, it’s worth remembering that Sheila Hancock, whose memoir Old Rage is a delight to read, played Nancy in the original Australian production of Oliver! I’m told that the greatest Mrs Lovett in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd is not Angela Lansbury or Helena Bonham-Carter or Imelda Staunton but Sheila Hancock. She didn’t do Shakespeare until she was 52 but she was the first woman to direct for the National Theatre and she put together a touring company for the Royal Shakespeare Company that included such newcomers as Daniel Day-Lewis, Roger Allam and David Tennant. She was married to John Thaw (famous as Inspector Morse) and they loved classical music and she continues to listen to Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion every Good Friday with Peter Pears as the evangelist and says – how’s this for a judgment? – she thinks it’s the greatest representation of human feeling that has ever been made.

There’s also an arresting ‘memoir’ by Paul Newman where his voice is juxtaposed with that of figures like the director Elia Kazan (the greatest of all directors of Tennessee Williams) but also, it seems, willing to sell people to the McCarthyist witch-hunters.

Not something that would have been possible with Alan Rickman, whose terse diaries make us grateful that the man who was Helen Mirren’s Antony in Antony and Cleopatra became a figure of legend to the millennials as Snape in Harry Potter.

Speaking of casting, and of Tennessee Williams, it is because of the skills of Kate Cherry (sometime head of Black Swan in Perth and former head of NIDA) that Melbourne audiences saw Ben Mendelsohn play the son in The Glass Menagerie and Guy Pearce play Chance – the Paul Newman role – in Sweet Bird of Youth.

Just now you can see Pearce in A Spy Among Friends as Kim Philby, that dazzling double agent. The streamer goes for six episodes and if you’re quick and lethal you can join BritBox for a free trial period and watch this extraordinary story of how Damian Lewis as Nicholas Elliott, the patriotic mate, tangles with the problem of Philby two-timing for the Russians. Guy Pearce gives a performance of utter silver-tongued magnetism, the establishment English voice impeccable, seductive, and dripping with the casual candour of bottomless charm. It is as fine, or finer, than anything Pearce has ever done, and it will make you gasp in wonderment at what an actor can achieve. And Damian Lewis, in an opposite, stolidly wholesome characterisation that’s at the same time hectic with complex divisions and subdivisions of feeling, absolutely rises to meet him. The third star of the show is Anna Maxwell Martin – remember her as Esther in the BBC half-hour serial version of Bleak House by Andrew Davies? She plays a Geordie woman who brings a world of sanity and scrutiny to this deadly boys’ club of people who found it easier to betray their country than their friends. A Spy Among Friends, based on the book by Ben Macintyre (who specialises in non-fiction thrillers) doesn’t minimise the ordinary people who lost their lives because of the spies. But one of the most uncanny moments in it is when Damian Lewis hallucinates Guy Pearce singing Elvis’s ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’

As of Boxing Day, Netflix has been streaming Matilda: The Musical. Matthew Warchus has turned this child’s eye view of an adult world, with Tim Minchin’s songs, into a marvellous movie with the great Emma Thompson as Miss Trunchbull.