Good witches and witches dubbed bad and born green. Wicked is one of those pieces of musical theatre that will dazzle the young with its lustre and grandeur as well as that great song, ‘Defying Gravity’. Sheridan Adams as Elphaba is initially tight and bewildered while Courtney Monsma is all radiant languor as Glinda the witch who’s been encouraged to believe how good she is and her ease shows given her advantages. But this is spectacular theatre, it drips with the glory of the magic it concocts and the kids will gasp. Simon Burke does everything he can as The Wizard and does it very well. And the great Australian actress Robyn Nevin – without any song – has a music of her own which comes from the power of her presence as Madame Morrible.

There’s the new production of Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight which dates back to 1938. It stars Geraldine Hakewill and Toby Schmitz and is directed by Lee Lewis and slightly adapts the old familiar plot in a way that tallies with the way the Millennial kids use the word ‘gaslight’.

Yesterday’s theatre is not out of date. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca was a stage show before it was a Hitchcock film. Perhaps Robyn Nevin could play the baleful housekeeper Mrs Danvers. Dame Judith Anderson’s performance in Hitchcock’s Rebecca has a matchless sinister magnetism. She created the role of Lavinia in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra and is Big Mama in the 1958 film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In Euripides’ Medea she toured her native Australia in 1955 with Zoe Caldwell as the Nurse though there is a version with the roles reversed. One babyboomer remembers saying to his father, ‘Why is he calling her my dear when he’s annoyed with her?’ ‘It’s her name.’ ‘How can her name be m’dear?’

She was granite-like and grim as Lady Macbeth in an American TV version of the play. Caldwell did one with Sean Connery who said it taught him how to play James Bond.

Judith Anderson ended up in that soap Santa Barbara and except with regional American roles she did everything in the Adelaide accent she was born and bred to.

It’s pleasing that Sam Neill as a young actor had a crack at Macbeth given that his mentor James Mason with his soft insinuating darkness of tone – so suited to Humbert Humbert in Lolita – was born for battlements and Birnam Wood.

Sam Neill gives a magnificent performance as a barrister in the courtroom streamer The Twelve and he is also central to the new streamer on Binge, Apples Never Fall which derives from a book of the same name by Liane Moriarty who gave the world the taut hair-raising violence of Big Little Lies with Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon which certainly claimed the attention of people who might not automatically read the somewhat pantingly excited books and high claims were made for the sequel with Meryl Streep. Apples Never Fall presents Sam Neill as the husband of that splendid actress Annette Bening. The central family the Delaneys operate in terms of two timeframes because the pivot of the drama concerns the fact that Bening, the easy sophisticated mother of her grown-up brood, has disappeared and suspicion falls on Sam Neill who plays a sometime upper-level tennis pro originally from Queensland.

Sam Neill who’s good at accents and has a very attractive cultivated one of his own (an old-fashioned educated Kiwi one) speaks in an unearthly crumpled and coruscating version of Americanised Strine which is so ghastly that it must be accurate.

And he seems on the face of it to be an unlikable character – violent and with a streak of quite nasty cruelty. So has he offed the charming woman who has spent her life with him but sees through him?

They’re both well into their sixties and some of the kids think she should have divorced him twenty years ago while others have a bit of time for their dad despite his rough-and-tumble side which seems such an offence against human sensitivity and civility.

Apples Never Fall was filmed in Queensland though the action has been transposed to Florida. This is done effortlessly and the younger Australian actors hold their own with Jake Lacy from The White Lotus. It’s a compelling well-made series in its ‘did he/didn’t he?’ way and it’s good to see two such distinguished older actors give such an effortless reality to a couple who have looked into the heart of darkness. But how?

It was strange to look at a Venezuelan soap the other week. Why? Well re-reading Gabriel García Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth was a reminder of the very classical realism the great magus of the magical variety could master and a reminder that Bolívar had liberated from Spain an area of South America several times the size of Europe. Well, Bolivar the 2019 streamer hails from Caracas and exhibits a very polished classical style of acting, the diction sounds sharp and the sets and costumes are to die for.

We see Bolívar at the height of his military power. He gives a Henry V-like speech about how they must cross the Andes. All the troops say it’s impossible, no one can cross them and then they gradually surrender with a great volley of ‘I’m Spartacus’ promises.

Then we jump back to the childhood of the teenage hero, at 14 or 15, lolling about in long johns and imbibing the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution from an urbane and canny teacher who succeeds in making a getaway before the forces of Francoist Spain start shooting and torturing people.

It’s all lustrous stuff until you discover how many hour-long episodes there are. Six, you think. Well, maybe twelve. But no, the life of the great liberator runs for sixty hours. A bit much for those of us who are not South American tragics.

Instead we took refuge in Tristana the 1970 film by that great director Buñuel. It’s on SBS On Demand, it’s lean and lucid in style, it has the young and slender Catherine Deneuve together with the handsome Franco Nero and is a tight masterly adaptation of the nineteenth-century classic by Benito Pérez Galdós.