“Broadway, in case you’re wondering, is second to none when it comes to buzz, and to audiences that, as Ian McKellen remarked when he won his Best Actor Tony for Amadeus in 1981, ‘lift you so high that sometimes you feel you want to fly for them’. But you can’t compare a city with (in a good year) 40 openings a season – and perhaps as many again in the major off-Broadway venues – to a capital like London that can open well over 250 shows in a year, from big musicals to agitprop, site-specific experiments to star vehicles, and reclamations of unfamiliar plays to soul-stirring reappraisals of time-honoured ones.”