It’s good to report that the latest revival of The Rocky Horror Show with Jason Donovan as Frank-N-Furter is true to the show’s reputation for madcap fun and glamour and pizzazz. Donovan is not the youngest lead the show has seen but he has stacks of authority and the great advantage of a dazzling young company behind him with a superb Riff Raff in Henry Rollo, a performer who has captivating looks and a voice with a beauty to match them. There are dozens of ways of doing the Narrator – it’s been done by everyone from Stuart Wagstaff to Gretel Killeen – and Myf Warhurst puts her vocal versatility to good satirical use. This is a production that everyone will be diverted by and it’s a bit of a gift to see a star with Jason Donovan’s range of experience – think of how long ago he did the most famous production of Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat – in this supersaturated campy and colourful role.

We’re a bit inclined to take him for granted but there are enough Britishers who will always see him – along with Kylie Minogue – as the supreme icon of a dreamt-of Australian idyll because of Neighbours. This Rocky Horror Show revival reminds us what we have always known: that he is a musical comedy performer of the first rank.

We  sometimes forget that it’s the musicals that make kids fall in love with the theatre because they represent the most pleasure-enriched form of entertainment you can indulge in. And Australia has an intimate relationship with The Rocky Horror Show. Not only did the great Reg Livermore do it on stage here – and you can still get that rare thing, the original Australian cast recording – but Jim Sharman (who had eclipsed overseas productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar) directed the film which had the kids who identified with the camp aesthetic of the show dancing and prancing around at endless screenings at such venues as Melbourne’s Valhalla back in the 1990s, providing a replica of what Tim Curry was doing on screen as a kind of homage that was also a form of self-mockery.

But the world of live entertainment has been full of every kind of music. There was Opera Australia’s concert performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser that caught the drama of Wagner’s dialectic between a sanctified and pure love and its besotted sensual opposite without any encumbering scenery and also highlighted two magnificent vocal performances – one from Amber Wagner as Elizabeth and the other from Anna-Louise Cole as Venus.

We need more versatility like this to show the virtuosity of our best young singers. And we should allow for flexibility in the area too. The Mozart Requiem at Scot’s Church last Saturday by Douglas Lawrence’s Australian Chamber Choir was not Claudio Abbado conducting the Berlin Philharmonic  with the likes of Bryn Terfel (which is what we may hear in our mind’s ear) but it was a clean, able attempt that allowed the audience to listen live to one of the greater pieces of music ever written.

Just at the moment you can catch in Geelong an exhibition of Clarice Beckett’s extraordinary paintings which were rescued by that great zealot for art, Rosalind Hollinrake. She salvaged these paintings which were the most poetical possible variations on the tonalism of Beckett’s teacher, Max Meldrum. Those poles without electrical appertunances that seemed to point to the infinite mystery of the sea and the enigma it betokens. Those cars with invisible drivers making their way down a boulevard which was just discernibly St Kilda Road. Clarice Beckett loved twilight and early morning when light is reduced to one tone and she had a sensibility that could encompass worlds of feeling and apprehension. Ros thinks that Clarice Beckett anticipated the extraordinary minimalist modulation of pinks you get – years later – in Rothko where the expressionism is being made to carry the weight Robert Hughes suggested once of an Old Testament prophet’s sense of exultation or dismay.

It’s true that you can get a sense of the haunted modernity that you find in an earlier American painter, Edward Hopper. Wouldn’t he have felt a sense of the poles going nowhere, the driverless cars, purposive but where to?

Ros was married in the 1960s to Barry Humphries in the days of his stupefying feats as a drinker. She helped with the characterisation of Sandy Stone and looked after the wayward genius and his two young children while he played Fagin in Oliver!, one of the greatest of all musicals.

Another one is My Fair Lady and there’s something cheering about the fact that Rex Harrison, Henry Higgins himself, had compassion for Ros when she arrived in the city of Manchester to find no Barry. Ultimately she left him which is one reason why we can ponder the greatness of Clarice Beckett.

Speaking of musicals, it was interesting to play through the different recordings of My Fair Lady recently which range through John Mauceri conducting the London Symphony Orchestra with Kiri Te Kanawa and Jeremy Irons and the version with one of the great Higginses in the original Shaw play Pygmalion, Alec McCowen. They all have their points but it’s when you hit the Rex Harrison versions (the first two with Julie Andrews) that you feel the overpowering sense of a performance that really did it.

Those who know his work are putting their money on the new production at the Old Fitz Theatre of A Streetcar Named Desire with Ben O’Toole as Stanley and Sheridan Harbridge, the Australian star in Prima Facie, hailed by some as better than Jodie Comer, as Blanche. Ben O’Toole is a wildly talented actor who has that most coveted quality – danger.

If you want to see young actors who actually look like the men of yesterday try SAS: Rogue Heroes on SBS. It’s about the formation of the SAS during the Western Desert campaign and it is dazzlingly performed and scripted and directed. The dreamer who sets it all up, Connor Swindells, gives a performance with the elan and effortless masculinity that has been looking extinct. He could play Henry V, he could play Henry Higgins, and he’s superbly counter-pointed by Jack O’Connell. Rogue Heroes is bizarre, over the top and deeply moving with a script by Steven Knight who wrote Eastern Promises for Cronenberg as well as Peaky Blinders.