Maxim Vengerov is touted as one of the world’s greatest violinists, the kind of musician who can fill Carnegie Hall and the performance that Melbourne audiences saw at Hamer Hall on Wednesday 7 August and which a Sydney audience will see at the Opera House on Saturday 10 August are the pyrotechnics as well as soulful feats of musicianship that seem to stay with audiences for the rest of their lives. He’s appearing with the renowned pianist Polina Osetinskaya and the programme includes Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 1 and Franck’s Violin Sonata which will provide ample demonstration of why Vengerov is spoken of with such awe. Will Australian audiences see him as the unsurpassable master he is sometimes touted as or just a distinguished talent? He’s certainly someone music lovers are going to have to see for themselves and his rapport with Osetinskaya is a thing of wonder.

If only more people had been able to see Castro’s Children which was on at Melbourne’s Gasworks and which closed alas the night the Melbourne Theatre Company’s Streetcar opened. It has a book and lyrics by Peter Fitzpatrick and music by Simon Stone. Even going on just the video the show is an absolute winner: vibrant, impassioned with magnificently bold lighting and a strong storyline that will ring the heart. A swooping brilliance of ambition, often achieved. Castro’s Children should be revived and Fitzpatrick and Stone and their full-throated cast deserve every encouragement in the world: such sap, such savvy, such bold and instinctive grasp of style.

At the opposite end of musical theatre is the Disney musical Beauty and the Beast at Melbourne’s Her Majesty’s which is appropriately a thing of magic; how clever it is of the Disney franchise to have invigorated the old movie-length animation films and turned them into stage shows that can run forever and entrance children and adults alike.

And this production of Beauty and the Beast really is everything the heart could desire. Shubshri Kandiah is an independent-minded, thoughtful Beauty, and the Beast too is a complex figure who has to transcend his egotistical animality if he is to become more than a paradoxical horror show of a creature. Brendan Xavier gives a dark complexity, a sense of warring forces in what is a captivating show. This is a haunted world, a world of enthralments and it is a further enhancement that both the leads sing beautifully and they have lyrics by Tim Rice and his collaborator Howard Ashman. The music is by Alan Menkin. There’s a world of gradated colour in this show that will ravish the eye and there’s also the magic that comes when a story echoes from such an archetypal past that it does feel as though its part of the fabric from which we’re made.

It helps that the musical is full of big numbers that have the audience stamping their feet and hallooing in delight. We never outgrow the deep sense of love vanquishing sorrow that is so integral to a musical like Beauty and the Beast.

In any case most people of any age will like this Beauty and the Beast and Her Majesty’s is richer in every sense to have it.

It was saddening to hear of the death of Janet Andrewartha, famous for her stints on Neighbours but also a reminder that there is an intimate relation between popular and serious culture. Janet Andrewartha did Joanna Murray-Smith’s Honour and took the role which various dames of the British theatre (Eileen Atkins and Diana Rigg) had played. She also did Arthur Miller’s All My Sons with John Stanton as the husband.

In his memoir Timebends Miller says the play is flawed on the subject of aerial weaponry. Watching it again after all these years in a production from Matthew Warchus’s Old Vic with Sally Field it did seem that the treatment of guilt and betrayal had a desolating poignancy and how actors like Andrewartha have a sense of the tragic which is instinctive and powerful.

It’s true that the plays of Arthur Miller which look like living forever are all to be found in the first volume of his work: Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge and The Crucible. The second volume starts out with the script of The Misfits, the film Miller wrote for his beloved Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable and which John Huston directed and it goes on from there to that doom-laden dream play After the Fall which took the New York stage with Jason Robards as the voice of Miller’s regret and lamentation. Ten years later Faye Dunaway played the Marilyn part to Christopher Plummer’s reminiscing husband. Miller’s memoirs don’t extend as far as Nick Hytner’s film of The Crucible with Daniel Day-Lewis as John Proctor, Winona Ryder as the wind-weaving witch girl (all lies and sexy tricks which cause such harrowing chaos) and Paul Scofield – the great Lear of his generation, the man who created the role of More in A Man for All Seasons – as the judge, Danforth.

Miller said that apart from the Salem witch trials as allegories of the lunacy of McCarthyism his guilt about his burgeoning affair with Marilyn Monroe played into the mix. He was also appalled to receive a letter which praised his apprehension of the wickedness of witches.

Arthur Miller was the great contemporary of Tennessee Williams and he praised Williams for placing the standard of beauty in the commercial theatre. You could say the same of Ray Lawler’s The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll which was such a hit when it opened for the Union Theatre Repertory Company. And the upshot – shameful even to recall – is that when it was filmed the four leads were played by imported stars. The very title of Lawler’s play evokes the instant dramatic poetry of Tennessee’s titles. And how amazing that the man who wrote The Doll should have died only the other day. He went back to the characters of the great play in related works in the 1980s – and they should be revisited – but they seem exercises in a different dramatic universe. You’d have to be very long in the tooth to have seen the original production but the production which will live forever in the mind’s eye is the 1995 one with Robyn Nevin directing like a goddess.